


Like A Moth by scarredsodeep

by scarredsodeep



Category: AFI
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drama & Romance, F/M, M/M, Older Characters, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-10
Updated: 2010-06-10
Packaged: 2018-03-05 00:02:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 107,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3097472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Longevity has always been the consolation prize for passion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Desperate Men

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, this is something a little different. For one thing, we're going to see some Javey, for the first time in years. For another, it's a more serious piece, thematic and dark, my stab at realism. There's also more sex than usual. Thank you for reading, enjoying, and telling me what you think... You know I love you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome! I'm so glad you're back here with me. As ever, it's an exciting place to be. I don't own the boys and this never happened and I make no profit from writing this, but give it a try and I'll think you'll enjoy it as much as I have. Also, Gustave Courbet's 1844 self-portrait titled Desperate Man is featured in this chapter. Google image that shit, it's good. I have lots of fun parallels planned for this story, and while the narrative draws attention to the first few, keep your eyes peeled and metacognitive senses firing. There's always a good chance you'll find something even I haven't seen yet.
> 
> I love you, guys. Thanks for being here with me, every time.

Jade eyed his silent partner over the brim of his coffee mug. He noted the lines spreading around his mouth, the soft sag of his eyelids; he couldn’t stop his eyes from sweeping unforgivingly over the soft slopes of flesh that had once been so young and firm and irresistible. Worse than this, this softness and slump of figure, the indomitable gravity of that tired face, was the hair, once so dark and gleaming, shot through with grey wires.

Jade’s mouth jerked into a frown, and he was overly conscious of the way his skin twisted to accomplish this. He tried to smooth his expression back to placid, peaceful, dull; but looking there at the grey in Adam’s hair, it was all he could do not to raise a hand to run through his own dwindling hair. Grey was one thing. At least Adam’s wasn’t thinning.

“You okay?” Adam asked routinely. After the first five years, you run out of new and interesting things to say to someone. After twenty-five, even the best intentions sound disinterested.

“I’m fine,” Jade said, alarmed at how caustic it came out sounding. One of Adam’s eyebrows lifted slightly, but that was the extent of his response. Even though that just irritated him more, Jade felt he should apologize for being so snappish so early in the day. “Not enough sugar,” he said lamely, knowing that Adam would see it for a lie.

Adam smiled at him, and the warmth in it softened him a little. “Then I’ll have to be sweet,” he said, kissing Jade’s cheek on his way out of the kitchen.

Jade’s stomach turned over and he had to force himself not to cringe. It wasn’t fair, having a gut reaction like that at a time like this, when things were going so well, when they were so happy. Adam, having finally beaten the odds and gotten a steady teaching job; and himself, at home, with all the time in the world to work on his great unfinished symphony. He should be happy. They both should be happy. They hadn’t had a fight in weeks. And—wasn’t Adam happy? Didn’t he seem to be? Jade couldn’t understand why he’d pick now, of all times, to rebel against himself; to ruin everything.

That wasn’t entirely true. Of course he could understand. It was what he always did. Time and time again, he’d use everything he had and fight with every inch to bring them to their knees, to immolate himself and everything in his path, to drag them screaming and bleeding to the brink of destruction; and then, just as everything fell apart, he’d wake up, realize that he loved Adam, that he wanted to live, and fall to the earth and beg, beg, _beg_ Adam to stay, not to leave him, not to give up.

When he was younger, he’d liked to romanticize it. He’d stay up till sunrise, desperately penning notes of what were meant to be beautiful movements but always ended up sounding flat, imagining that he was trapped inside himself, helpless but to watch, not wanting the suffering, not wanting to hurt Adam or himself. But he was older now—no. He was old now. And he knew better.

It was deliberate every time.

Adam waved as he drove past the kitchen window, on the way to the college. Jade forced himself to lift a hand and wave back, but it was too late; Adam had gone past.

It will be different this time, he told himself. This time I’ll fight it. This time I won’t.

But he didn’t believe it, not really, not even then.

 

 

3 p.m. and here he was, sitting numbly in the small, dark study, sheet music in various states of blankness spread in an ungodly heap across the desk. In a slightly more orderly pile off to the side, there were the sheets in various states of completedness. Most of these were atrocious, affronts to the name of music, and it made Jade ill even to look at them. But every now and then, there was a certain progression, a measure or two, that might be salvageable. Primly aligned in a speckled brown document folder, stuffed in the bottom drawer, were the first two thirds of the symphony Jade had been writing for most of his life. Some of it was beautiful. Most of it was shit. Someday, he was going to finish it; finish it and get the recognition he deserved; finish it and hear it played in the most beautiful opera houses in the country, maybe even the world; finish it and never have to write a goddamn radio jingle or pop melody again; finish it and forever cease paying the bills with his dignity.

His pen had long since slipped out of his slumped grip. The surface of the ink was placid, undisturbed by the slightest ripple. He hadn’t written a single goddamn note all day.

When the phone rang, Jade jumped half out of his skin. Why was the fucking ringer on? When he was working, there were to be no interruptions. It was the first and foremost rule of the household, of his entire life. But there was no one to blame but himself, no one to rage at or torment with guilt; it was his own cell phone and he was the only one home. Jade sighed, screwing the lid back onto the ink bottle with one hand and fumbling his phone out from under the heap with the other. Perhaps working wasn’t the right word after all. It’s not like he’d accomplished any damn thing.

“Hello?” he snapped, flipping open his phone. He didn’t bother to disguise his irritation, his disgust. Let the caller think it was meant for them. He didn’t care.

“Jade! Oh, I’m so pleased you answered,” the sweet Southern accent of his neighbor met the challenge brightly. Jade sighed, caring. It was Mellie Burgan, whose intentions were never anything but good. She was the last person in the world, including newborns and puppies, who should have to shoulder his bad disposition. That observed, he made an effort to fill his voice with false cordiality.

“Mellie!” he beamed. He’d read somewhere that people could tell whether or not you were smiling when you spoke to them on the phone. He wondered idly if they could tell whether or not it was a fake smile. It’s not like he was making any big show of sincerity. “It’s always nice to hear your voice.”

Mellie giggled, and Jade didn’t doubt her sincerity for a minute. Mellie was a good ten years younger than her husband, as docile and sweet a woman as you’d find anywhere. She was a bright girl, and pretty; worst of all, she was one of those gratingly selfless people, a hospice nurse and cheerful as the Devil himself come the Rapture. Jade could have gagged. No; the worst of it wasn’t that she was obnoxiously perfect, and otherwise everything deplorable about the human race; it was that he _liked_ her. Everyone did. It couldn’t be helped.

“I know it’s short notice, but I’m making a ham tonight, and there’s just no way Mr. Burgan and I can finish the whole thing,” Mellie blustered on. “So if it’s not too much trouble, I’d be tickled if you and that handsome man of yours would join us.”

Jade winced. Oh, god, not another dinner party with these people. The husband was all right; he was a professor at the university, had been for years. Their home, just down the street, was much grander than the grubby claptrap Adam’s salary just barely afforded; it was a sweet little Victorian with plush carpet and matching light fixtures and an enormous gleaming kitchen. The thought of sitting through a delicious home-cooked meal in the oak-and-chandelier dining room before retiring to the armchairs in the library for drinks was enough to make Jade physically ill. “Mel, I hate to say it, but we’ve already got plans for the evening. Maybe another time,” he added, because he didn’t want to be ungrateful.

Mellie, gracious as any human has a right to be, met his bluff with genuine remorse. “Well, I’m just now rolling out the dough for a peach pie. If you get the chance, drop in for dessert after your other thing, ‘kay? I know it’s your favorite, and Hunter’s been itching to have a word with Adam. I guess the head of their department is retiring and—oh, I don’t mean to bore you with the details, just stop in if you’ve got the time,” she said gaily. Damn that woman, peach pie _was_ his favorite. Jade felt manipulated and vowed to skip dinner entirely. That would show her.

“Of course,” he said regretfully, as if there was nothing he’d rather do. “Thanks again for the invite,” he added before hanging up, although he didn’t think he’d thanked her in the first place. Well, it was too late now.

Jade glared fiercely at the heap of pristine sheet music on the desk, staring, challenging him to write something down upon it. At this point, he could piss on a page and it would be a better composition than anything he could do with ink. That infernal busybody. Couldn’t leave anyone to his peace. Just thinking about Mellie’s pie made his stomach growl uneasily. Fuck the world.

 

 

Across town, Adam stared helplessly down at the ungodly mess of papers strewn across his desk, a vista the opposite of Jade’s, everything scrawled with a spectrum of ink, comments and thoughts and dutiful notation. There were lesson plans, articles of interest, his to-do list of historical pursuit, endless assignments from endless students, all spilling across the varnished surface in a manner that wasn’t entirely friendly. There were new textbooks he was supposed to audit, reading he needed to catch up on, presentations for several separate conferences he should really start working on, memos from the board, and great sloping piles of student work. Somehow all of this demanded his attention; somehow he was supposed to contend with all of this at once.

He was weakly sifting through these piles, as plagued by the presence of ink as his partner was by its absence, wiggling out those student essays he’d left the longest, trying to talk himself into the long haul ahead of him, when his colleague knocked lightly on the doorframe. Adam looked up, smiling to see one of his favorite visitors. Hunter Burgan was a few years past fifty, round about the middle with a close-shaved, stubbly head. He had thin silver-framed glasses that he was constantly fiddling with, and electric blue eyes that lent greatly to his animation. His lectures were good, lively and engaging with infallible research, accentuated with light speculation and humorous asides. When students signed up for a history section, it was Burgan’s name they hoped to get. He’d been with the university for almost thirty years, and had published four books to date.

“Save me,” Adam joked to Burgan. “I’m being buried alive.”

Burgan grinned, settling into one of the cracked leather chairs across from Adam’s desk. “I’ve just remembered, Melanie wanted me to ask you and Jade to dinner tonight. She’s making a ham.”

Adam’s smile grew broader. Neither he nor Jade was much for cooking. Melanie Burgan was a godsend. Once or twice a month, she would inevitably call, inviting them for dinner and drinks. She employed a variety of different tactics, from planning an evening months in advance to waiting till the last minute; she made bribes of favorite meals, of televised events they might enjoy as a foursome, of articles Jade just had to see or music he just had to hear. She tried everything to snag Jade into acquiescence, and Adam wasn’t sure why she had picked them out of all the other couples on the street. Maybe it was because Adam taught in the same department as Burgan, and Melanie fancied her husband a protégé; maybe it was because they, too, were childless, adrift in houses with more bedrooms than they could fill. Whatever the reason, Adam was grateful to her continued effort. Jade was not an easy man to socialize with, but meals at the Burgans’ stood out as the best in Adam’s memory. The company was easy, the evening was pleasant, the food was outstanding, and the most effort he had to go through to enjoy all this was bringing over the occasional bottle of wine. That, and reasoning and pleading and bargaining and bullying for hours and days to get Jade to agree.

This, Adam was aware, was a new tactic. Invitations were usually submitted formally over the phone in the evening, when they were both at home, or brought over by Melanie personally, attached to a basket of cookies or a jar of homemade jam. But asking Adam while he was still at work, cut off from his partner the nay-sayer? He had to admire its brilliance. “We’d be delighted,” Adam beamed, aware he would pay dearly for those three words when he relayed them to Jade, but damn it, he worked hard. He worked hard to get this job and he worked hard to keep it, and if he could enjoy dinner with his influential colleague from time to time, it would do wonders for his career. And—didn’t he deserve to have a friend? He worked all week, graded all weekend. He tried to take care of the house and the yard and his partner and make ends meet, and it’s not like Jade did _anything_ to help. It’s not like Jade did _anything_ at all! Yes; he deserved this.

Adam immediately felt guilty about his mental outburst. That wasn’t fair. He loved Jade. The man was so many wonderful things; wasn’t it all right if he wasn’t social? It wasn’t fair for Adam to pressure him into things he didn’t want to do, like go to the Burgans’ for dinner. Adam nodded his head crisply and revised, “That is, _I’d_ be delighted. It all depends on Jade. I know he’ll just be pleased as hell you asked, but solitude is very important to his work, and sometimes he’ll be up for days without eating or sleeping or anything, just writing furiously… Composing really is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? He must hear the most beautiful music in his head.” Adam sighed happily, proud of Jade, grateful he was lucky enough to have been chosen by such a talented man.

Burgan nodded mutely. “Yes, my wife and I have always been very impressed with Jade’s work. Don’t tell him this, but Mellie’s got a recording of that sonata he did all those years ago. Puts it on every now and again, lets it fill the whole house. Says it’s just the saddest, sweetest thing she’s ever heard. You’ll let us know, of course, the next time they do a production of his?” It was polite babble, small talk, and it was only the surface of Burgan. Beneath it there was a much less courteous, much more interesting man, one whose company Adam truly enjoyed. But Adam found that his personal relationships were always stilted at work, as if he himself were a different, more awkward person once he sat behind this desk. Certainly he found himself saying the wrong things and not knowing the words for the right ones often enough. But it wasn’t that way when he was teaching. When he lectured, Adam felt more himself than anywhere else, completely surrendered to the noble art of story-telling, of continuing the history of man.

Adam shuffled papers and plodded awkwardly through a few polite minutes of talk. Finally, Burgan got to his feet. “We’ll be seeing you this evening, then. Around seven.”

“Er—yes—maybe—” but Burgan was gone, and Adam was left with his own mincing, apologetic tone. Adam sighed, feeling as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and pulled out his phone, squinting at the screen and dialing Jade.

“Yes?” Jade answered brusquely, agitation aggravated. Work must be going poorly, Adam thought grimly. Not a surprise. He had hardly written a note in months. Still, he sounded bad-tempered even for Jade. Adam supposed that shouldn’t surprise him either. They’d been happy lately, hadn’t they? Or at least, things had been going well. So of course Jade would be in a foul mood.

“Hey, babe,” Adam said brightly. After so many years, it should be impossible to disguise the feeling in his voice; but it had only gotten easier. Easier to craft the cheerful lies, and easier to believe them. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

A younger Jade would have groaned, would have been irritated and unwilling; he would have bitched and fussed, but it would have been familiar; it would have been Jade. This new creature, though—the one he’d been busy becoming these last few years—was silent, calculating, patient. It was his own fault, Adam had been painfully aware all along; it was the result of years of bitter disappointment. Adam knew he had been bitterly disappointing. He certainly hadn’t been the man he’d promised—certainly hadn’t been the man that Jade deserved. Adam bit his tongue before he could apologize. The urge was never far from the surface.

“Are you still there?” Adam asked, sounding a little less cheerful now.

“Mmm,” Jade hummed, not noticing.

“Sorry,” said Adam, and winced. There it was, what he privately held responsible for all their problems—weak and sniveling and self-defeating, the word ‘sorry’. “I’m buried in work here, keep getting distracted. Listen, I told Hunter Burgan we’d stop by around seven if you were up to it. I guess Melanie is making a ham, and I thought it would do us some good to get out a bit. I mean—they’re good people.”

“No one’s saying they aren’t,” Jade came back irritably. “Why do you always do that? ‘They’re good people’. We’re not in the mafia. Do you think I care what sort of _people_ they are? Do you remember what I said to you after the last time we had dinner there? I said—”

Adam ground his teeth, tuning out Jade’s character assassination. He couldn’t just say no. He couldn’t just say he didn’t want to. He had to turn in into some condescending summary of what, exactly, the problem with Adam—nay, with their whole relationship, possibly the entire world—was.

“—the very idea of it is _nauseating_ to me!” Jade was saying. Apparently today was one of the days he thought he was Jean-Paul Sartre and not a sub-par composer who couldn’t finish a piece of music to save his life. Adam recoiled at his own cruel thought. “Honestly, if we have to discuss the moral caliber of your friends one more time, I will—”

Safe on the other end of the phone, Adam rolled his eyes and waited for a lull in the verbal lashing that passed as a conversation. Jade isn’t a monster, he told himself over and over. It’s a bad day, it’s a bad month, he hates the house, he hates the town, he hates this life. I promised him better. I let him down.

Adam had recited it often enough, believed it hard enough, that he was damn near convinced. It was his fault. It was all the constant failure Adam had brought home over the years, as they moved from dingy apartment to dingy apartment, as Adam lost job after job, as they grew older and older and poorer and poorer and forgot, little by little, what it was to be in love.

When Jade paused for breath, he made his move. Supporting. Loving. Understanding. One day, Jade would realize what wonderful qualities they were in a partner; one day, his years of patience and kindness (and failure) would pay off.

“That’s fine, J. We’ll stay in tonight,” Adam soothed. But no fight, real or imagined, ever ended that easily. Not with Jade.

“We can’t now,” Jade complained. “Then they’ll think I didn’t want to go.”

“But babe,” Adam said, exhaling slowly, “you _don’t_ want to go.”

Jade of ten years ago would have hung up, swearing. But this version just sighed. He didn’t even try to be hurtful by asking Adam not to call him ‘babe’. He’d be unrecognizable if Adam hadn’t been staring at him across the kitchen table for the last year. “You’re right. That’s true. I don’t.” A pause. Adam tried to marshal his thoughts, launch a rebuttal. But just as he opened his mouth, Jade started speaking again with all the petulance of a 19-year-old self Adam still fondly remembered. “You know what? Fuck what the Burgans think. I’m not going.”

Adam had planned for this. “I’m relieved you said that,” he lied. “I’m swamped with these midterm papers. I’m going to kind of camp out here for a few more hours—work on grading these bastards. Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” Jade said shortly. Jade always shied away from the implication he might be a shrew, which he was. “I hadn’t even noticed the time. Is it late?”

Adam listened closely, trying to detect foul play and veiled accusation in Jade’s inquiry. But they were grown men; there were no more games. Jade really had gotten lost in his work.

“It’s almost five,” Adam told him, fondness welling up in him. God, but he loved Jade. It didn’t have the urgency of their youth; what was left was deep, abiding tenderness, and maybe that was better than the angry, volatile passion that had so easily flickered and so painfully burned. He didn’t know how to express it, though; Jade was traditionally unreceptive to tenderness.

But Jade surprised him, then. “Ads?” he said, handling the nickname almost shyly, affectionate. Maybe Jade had felt it too, Adam thought, carried away, heart soaring, feeling holistic and spiritual and deeply alive, electrified by the soul-deep connection of their love.  
“Yeah?” Adam whispered, as much a romantic as ever, heart beating metallic in his mouth.

“Don’t come home drunk,” Jade said, voice so absent of kindness that Adam plummeted, pained and reeling, sure now that he had only imagined the softness, the evidence of love, in his name; convinced that there was no bond, nothing left, just two stubborn old men with a routine.

Adam’s fist had contracted, crumpling the paper he was holding. He felt overwhelmingly abandoned.

“Go to hell,” he whispered numbly to the dead line, and meant it.

 

 

Jade sat still, jaw slowly working as he chewed methodically on his bottom lip. He held his phone in his hand, pushed back from his desk, unmoving save for his churning jaw. How long had he sat there? Moments, maybe; hours. The room had slowly gone dark, light seeping out through the cracks, as he peeled the skin from his bottom lip, and he did not move.

He thought.

He thought in a dispassionate way, as a third party observer, unacquainted with such characters as Adam and Jade. As a third party observer, he thought they were unrealistic—too typified, artificial. No one looking on would believe they were real people. They were archetypes, poorly written, poorly conceived; two-bit players in a two-bit play. It was evident to him, this third party non-Jade sitting alone, unmoving, in the dark, that they weren’t people. They were plastic houseplants. They acted as if they were real people; they even tried to say and do things they had seen other people say and do, as if that would make them real; but in the end, the fact remained. They were not alive.

The one called Adam—he was trying much too hard. In love and in pain, unappreciated and undeserved, pouring all he had into an emotional void—it was overacted, a half-hearted performance, as if he didn’t believe it himself. As for the emotional void—well, he was just pathetic. Petty, combative, false. Fancied himself an artist but lacked the talent to back it up, so he tortured himself for an audience, inauthentically sensitive and isolated and alone, and used the people he loved ‘til they were used up, used them to destroy himself; loved them only to hurt them, hurt them to feel pain—all this because he couldn’t write a song the way he wanted it to sound, because he didn’t know how he wanted it to sound—because he wanted to be more than he was, and he wasn’t. He was toxic and sad and afraid; it made the third party grateful that he wasn’t a man, not really, because nothing is more repulsive than a self-styled tragedy.

Jade’s mouth filled with blood, hot and saline, unexpected. The shock of sensation brought him back to himself. He tongued his split lip tenderly, feeling ill-fitted inside his skin, uncomfortable with what he had thought and seen, uncomfortable to be breathing, uncomfortably self-aware. And that—the self-awareness—what was it but another name for self-flagellation? Jade felt weary, sick with it, sick of himself.

He sucked on his bloody lip and tried not to cry.

 

 

Adam crammed his shoulder bag full of the midterm papers, stocked it with red Flair pens, and locked his office door behind him. He drew his coat about him before stepping into the chill of the evening, and he fished his cell of out its deep pocket, feeling shady.

“Hunter, hello,” Adam said briskly into the phone, voice breaking the stillness into slivers. It was damned cold out here. Could it be winter already? “I’ve got a bit of grading to do—yes, you would—and it’s too grey a night to spend alone in the faculty building, so I—no, he won’t be joining me—drinks and midterms in the study it is, then! I’ll see you shortly.”

The success of the phone call, Hunter’s happy, booming invitation, warmed Adam all the way to the car. He coaxed the grumpy old Buick into turning over and felt his fingers begin to cramp in the cold as the so-called heater whined and pumped the car full of frigid air.

Drinks, dinner, more drinks—good company, conversation, and the scholarly pursuit of grading papers. Adam smiled at the very thought of the evening ahead of him. He had a feeling that without Jade there to sulk and kill the conversation, it would be a lovely evening indeed.

 

 

As soon as he arrived, he felt welcome—like a regular guest or an old friend, part of the family. He wasn’t, not by a long shot, but the Burgans just had that way about them. Melanie took his coat in the foyer and directed him to the cheery, well-lit study. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered two of the walls; a third held a large stone fireplace, blazing away merrily. Hunter was situated in one of the enormous leather armchairs, legs crossed, sucking pensively on a pipe as he himself worked through the stack of student papers on the long-legged end table beside him. He looked so much a professor that Adam found himself sighing, feeling as if he had come in from the cold in a sense much greater than the literal.

Burgan looked up, smiling warmly. He gestured at the sideboard near the door. An honest-to-god decanter of amber liquid and a single crystal-cut glass sat on a silver platter, waiting. It was the single most idyllic scene Adam had ever been a part of. “Pour yourself a brandy,” Burgan urged, seemingly unaware of how perfect his life was, “and pull up an armchair. Melanie!” He raised his voice at the last, calling into the other room. “Bring a pipe for Adam!”

“I don’t really smoke,” Adam said, feeling himself blush. “Not since I was a kid.”

“Nonsense,” Hunter told him. “You’ll sit and you’ll smoke and we’ll drink. It’s the only way to work.” Adam tried, once again, to protest, but Burgan dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “I insist. If you’re going to be a professor, you’re going to do it right.”

Adam smiled, uncertain but pleased. Melanie came in a few moments after he’d started on the first paper, and he was grateful for the interruption; it was terribly dull, as student papers tended to be. Melanie was almost through showing him how to pack the pipe when he registered the heavy swell of her breasts and small, hard bulge of her abdomen. Breasts were usually not something he gave much attention to. “Melanie! Congratulations! I had no idea you were expecting,” he burst out with real enthusiasm. Melanie’s face suffused with the shy glow of her smile. Burgan beamed up over the small reading glasses Adam could only call spectacles, so much more scholarly than his own wire frames. Adam smiled at her pretty, flushed face. They were the picture of domestic academic life, these two. “That’s just wonderful news,” he added, in all sincerity.

Melanie blushed a deeper red, quiet and proud. She excused herself from the room shortly thereafter, humming with pleasure. Adam exchanged the usual congratulatory banter with Burgan but, in the end, men were men; there was only so much they had to say about babies. They lapsed into a comfortable silence and Adam dug into the stack of papers. He found it easier to grade here, in this scholar’s study, than in his own drafty office or his grim, chilly home. He couldn’t shake the perception that there was warmth here his own home lacked; it was Melanie, yes, but it was Burgan too—the way they were together, the mellow understanding that stretches across long years together. Adam didn’t know if Burgan and his wife shared any extraordinary connection and bond, but they had a symbiotic knowledge of each other, a respectful awareness, a pretty kind of coexistence he knew he didn’t have, maybe had never had, with Jade.

Thinking it made Adam feel a distant pang of sadness, so he stopped. Instead he poured himself into the clumsy words of his students. He was certain that in his own days as a student, he had been more careful, done more research, dealt with history with more accuracy and grace. He grimaced, sounding even to himself like a crabby old man (which wasn’t that far off from the truth, really).

Even a crabby old man had to admit, though, that with a pipe in one hand and a pen in the other, oiled by drink, the papers went down more smoothly. Even their glaring inaccuracies, outright fabrications, and stylistic butcheries seemed more intelligent, better done, in the academic setting. His grimace faded and became more generous. Passing marks didn’t feel like half-hearted defeat; they felt just, earned by effort, in some cases even deserved. He had settled into a satisfying B- rhythm and was feeling good about his students when he reached the crumpled paper, a discussion on the relationship between art and the French Revolution. It was hardly an original topic, and he steeled himself for a painful six-to-eight pages, trying in vain to smooth out the creases. With a pang of guilt he remembered the conversation with Jade, what he’d said. That too melted away as he began to read, skimming along until he hit the description of a painting.

 

> “What makes _The Desperate Man_ (1844) so compelling is the arrogance inherent to it, the hunger in Courbet’s gaze. It reinforces the thought that beauty, that truth, is torture, will drive you mad; will take you to the edge of the abyss and make you stare into the face of endless nothing, and you will go _mad_. Only then will you know beauty; only then will you conceive of his genius; it brags that he has surged forth to meet infinity with one foot still on earth, and shaped what he has seen and felt and known into paintings like this one. The piece challenges the viewer; it warns the viewer that 99 out of 100 who lay eyes on it will mistake Courbet’s genius for an arrogant myth and only a few will know, will primordially remember, what it means to be a man, what it is to be alive. Let them not see, the painting cries. Let them pass in derision and blindness: we are better off without them. He painted in his own face the pride and haughtiness inherent to knowing one’s own potential, and looking upon _The Desperate Man_ , the viewer knows that it is no longer the man that matters. He is rotted; he is dead. But his face remains, his dark sunken eyes and knotted hands and anguished beauty, his filthy unwashed hair; there is still the perfection of each eye, falsely matched one to the other, correcting nature’s clumsy hand even on his own kneaded flesh. Courbet paints himself unafraid of being called selfish or arrogant, knowing that these are virtues; and he is confident that none will dare call him a fraud, because stultifying his genius would only identify the denouncer as a fraud himself—a creature that pretended to be a man, but was not; whose heart did not pump red blood, and who had never felt what it was to live.” 

 

It was, quite simply, the most extraordinary paper he had graded in all his years of teaching. The content was solid, the allusions perceptive and fresh—but what stood out was the beauty of the words themselves. They were almost lyrical in their quality; they dealt deftly with the subject and lent a grace to history Adam had rarely found. There was nothing revolutionary in the content, of course, and he had seen better arguments. Adam realized he was trying to dissuade himself from being taken with the paper, trying to talk himself out of the ringing praise he could feel building up, waiting to burst. How long had it been, he wondered, since he let himself enjoy the pleasure of a thing? Since he didn’t try and talk himself out of anything and everything beautiful. Not this time, he told himself. This time, he would feel it; savor it; value it.

“This,” he said aloud to nobody in particularly, “is a beautiful paper.”

Lost in its pages, he’d almost forgotten Burgan was there. “Oh?” said his colleague, as if roused from a deep sleep. Burgan too seemed to have forgotten he was not alone. “In our department? This I must see.”

Adam shared the paper with Burgan gladly, confident that the rich emotion of the writer would resonate with the other man as well. Burgan read it through twice and Adam waited on tenterhooks. He had let the paper matter to him; he had let himself love it; he wanted Burgan to appreciate its value as deeply. Finally, Hunter looked up. He laid the paper down on his knees and studied Adam’s face over the rim of his spectacles. “Yes,” he said at last. “It is.” Adam thought that there was something else there, in Burgan’s eyes or his voice, some note of warning. But Burgan passed the paper back without further comment, instead raising his glass, Adam mirroring the gesture sheepishly even as Burgan said, “At the very least, it’s something to drink to.”

 

 

Jade had been crying.

He had sat in the dark with blood in his mouth, feeling hollow and helpless and tired: tired of being him, tired of being tired, tired of everything. And he had cried, disgusted and weak, and he’d wanted to claw his way out of his skin. And more than anything, he had wanted Adam; Adam, Adam, Adam. Adam to still his shaking limbs; Adam to warm his knotted hands; Adam to kiss his eyelids and tell him something, tell him anything, to make it better. It was childish, it was selfish, but it was what he wanted. Besides this: he was fifty-two years old. He had given the best of himself, of his life, to Adam. It was a small thing he was asking, forgiveness. And hadn’t they loved? Hadn’t they loved well, and forgiven? They had both given what it took to keep the other. So yes; he would be vulnerable. He would ask this comfort, this forgiveness; he would tell Adam, as he hadn’t for so long, that he needed him.

At least, that was the plan.

That was the plan until Adam came home drunk.

After Jade had _specifically_ asked him not to come home drunk.

Weakness and tenderness were consumed instantly in a fire of rage, of something huge and hateful that Jade gave into gladly. Jade moved suddenly, jerkily; he got to his feet, joints stiff and aching, and stood in the dark doorway like doom itself.

“You’re still up!” Adam effused with the warmth of drink. His cheeks were red, eyes glassy, beard peppered with grey. Jade hated him. Jade _loathed_ him. Jade could stab him repeatedly in the chest and feel no remorse. In that moment, he _wanted_ to kill him. To demolish the sloppy smile of his years of wasted youth.

“You’re drunk,” he said, voice hardly more than a whisper. Adam’s blood would spill hot, but not Jade’s. Jade was cold. Jade would replace all Adam’s heart pills with Mike ‘n Ike’s, and he would collapse blue-faced to the floor, and Jade would not dial 911, would not even move, because Jade Puget’s veins ran with fucking _ice_. “I told you not to come home drunk.”

Adam’s face fell into a hard frown. “Yeah, about that,” he said, voice rising. “What’s that about?”

Jade might have laughed, once. But now he betrayed no emotion. His rage, his disgust, was absolute. Jade was in the process of choosing how to imply that Adam was an alcoholic as acerbically as possible when Adam seemed decided he wasn’t in the mood to wait for his partner to invent a drinking problem tonight.

“We’re not _kids_ anymore, Jade,” he said emphatically, in case Jade had not noticed the ache in his bones or the crick in his neck or the way all his skin either folded or sagged. “Don’t you ever feel like we don’t have much time left? Like we don’t have time for all this bullshit anymore. The fighting, being unhappy, all the shit we’ve spent 30 years on. I don’t want to waste anymore of our time like this.”

There. Jade saw it—there. Something he could latch onto—something he could turn around and use to hurt Adam, to hurt himself. But just as he opened his mouth, Adam was speaking again.

“Something really amazing happened, J. You’ve got to read this paper.” Adam was pressing pages into Jade’s hands before he could reconcile the subject shift, and he was too disarmed the refuse them. Jade stared down uncomprehendingly at the sheets, dark lines of text a blur to him even with his contacts in. Fuck, but he was getting old. What was next—bifocals?

Age gripped him with vice-like claws and he relented. Maybe Adam was right. Maybe he didn’t want to have the same empty fight for the thousandth time, the one that would leave him hollow and biting back tears on the edge of the bed while he desperately tried to conceive of a way out that didn’t involve backing down. “Okay,” he heard himself say. “I’ll read it.”

Adam kissed Jade’s cheek sweetly, oblivious to the bullet he’d dodged. Jade wondered if he was bulletproof yet, after all the years of target practice. “Not tonight,” Adam told him, sounding tired, sounding his age. “Time for sleep.”

It didn’t feel like defeat, taking Adam’s hand and allowing himself to be led to bed. It didn’t feel like defeat, but Jade couldn’t help knowing it was.

End Notes:

So, they're old men. How does that make you feel? We'll see more of Davey next chapter--a lot more. He's going to make you laugh, I promise. I'm having a blast writing this.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	2. Sexual Favors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own the boys, none of this happened, and I make no profit from writing this.
> 
> That said! I'd first like to say happy birthday to FictionAddiction, and call this update a present. From there: we see our first Davey this chapter, and I think there's some pretty hilarious bits, with further insight into Jade's life work. Your thoughtful reviews have given me a lot of hope for this story, and I'm hoping that with your continued support I can make it into something beautiful.
> 
> Thank you, everyone, for reading.
> 
> Love.

Adam watched Jade carefully, swirling his orange juice around in its cup. His partner hunched over the student paper, breakfast untouched and coffee forgotten, eyes tearing into the pages almost violently. When Jade finished the paper, Adam hoped he might speak; instead he flipped it back and started over. Adam hoped this was a good thing. Jade’s brow was creased in concentration. Adam finished his orange juice and put on another pot of coffee, anticipating his partner’s desire for a new cup when he returned to reality and saw how cold his own had grown. He was almost convinced he couldn’t take the silence any longer when Jade’s clear voice startled him. It was not quite toneless, but its quality betrayed nothing as Jade read, “‘Look, see my suffering, see my pain, as stark and bare as truth; and know that I have felt and seen what you can only imagine.’ Where does he get this stuff, Adam? It’s incredible!”

Vindicated at last, Adam emptied Jade’s mug and refilled it, smiling. “You like it?” he asked, trying to contain the bubble of laughter building in his chest.

“I thought history was supposed to be mind-numbingly boring,” Jade said at last, looking up at Adam over his freshly steaming coffee. There was a smile on his lips and fondness in his voice, and Adam’s tired heart soared, never having learned better.

“It is,” Adam assured him. “It really is. I’ve never gotten a paper like this before.”

Jade seemed to be crackling with some kind of latent electricity Adam didn’t often get to see. His eyes shone, spots of pink in his cheeks dispelled some of his malnourished pallor, and his burgeoning smile was the most beautiful thing Adam had ever seen. “What are you going to tell him?” Jade asked excitedly. “I mean—are you going to have him come to your office? Or, I don’t know—”  
Adam winced a little bit. “I thought I might just… hand it back as is.”

Jade’s mouth flopped open in true astonishment and he flipped to the last page of the paper, squinting at Adam’s slanting comments. “‘Eloquent exploration of theme, good discussion’?” he asked, sounding scandalized. “‘However, does not satisfy assignment parameters’? But you’ve got to tell him—”

“That this is one of the best papers I’ve ever gotten?” Adam laughed a little at that. “That would be terribly bad form, J. And anyway—” he helped himself to a bit of Jade’s cold toast—“he didn’t address the assignment, not really. He had some nice things to say about art, of course, but it’s a French history class, not art history.”

Jade gaped at Adam. “That’s—not—the point!” he said, all joy fading from his face. Still, Adam mused as his heart sank back into its familiar slump, it was nice to see him so passionate about something. It had been some time since he’d been so galvanized. “The bits he wrote about genius, Adam—here, look at page seven—”

“I’ve seen page seven,” Adam said as gently as he could manage. “Here, do you want me to write that it’s a beautiful paper? I can do that if—”

But Jade was stricken by the marks he’d seen at the bottom of the last page. “ _You gave this a C_?” he bellowed, leaping to his feet. It was a dramatic gesture, and a braver Adam might have laughed aloud.

“I had to, dear. There’s a rubric,” Adam tried to explain. Jade wasn’t listening. He was frowning somewhat petulantly down at Adam with the utmost disapproval he was capable of conveying with his lips alone.

“Well, that’s bullshit,” Jade bit out, snappish. “Your student wrote something beautiful, and he deserves—”

Adam’s patience was cracking. Jade hadn’t expressed an interest in his work in years, and anyway, it wasn’t anyone’s position to tell him how to do his job. Yes, the paper was wonderful; but it didn’t meet the requirements, and that was that. A C was the absolute best grade he’d been able to justify, and he’d awarded a few extra points for creativity to keep it that high, which wasn’t strictly fair to the other students anyway. “He doesn’t even have a reference page,” Adam said, trying to keep his irritation from showing through in his voice. “That’s a whole letter grade right there. If I taught a poetry class, or a creative writing class, the quality alone would carry it, but I don’t. I teach a class about facts, and he’s got far more artistic flair than he has facts, and his grade reflects that.” He said it in a way that brooked no discussion, the same voice he used on students that were posing arguments against their marks.

Jade looked seriously put off, and a surge of affection threatened to overpower Adam’s annoyance. It was so wonderful to watch him fight for something, to argue and cajole and defend art. He sat there looking so angry and speechless, in fact, that Adam made a gesture he normally wouldn’t have. He slid the paper across the table to face him and scrawled along the bottom, in the blue ink he’d been using for his crossword puzzle, _See me after class_. “There. I’ll have him in my office and tell him that I, and my colleagues—” he pluralized it significantly, since Burgan was his only strict colleague who had read the thing—“thoroughly enjoyed his paper, and that he was a flair for writing, and that if on his next paper he’ll stick a little closer to the rubric and attach a Works Cited page he can expect an A.”

Jade’s look of disgruntlement had grown to full-on revulsion. “Stamp the creativity out of him in person, will you?” he said in a small, ugly voice. Adam saw immediately what Jade was doing. He was associating Adam’s desire to mold his student’s project into something vaguely resembling the criteria to his own inability to finish his symphony. It was an illogical leap, but Jade was quite practiced in the area of wild irrationalization.

“Babe,” Adam wheedled with a sigh, “it’s not like that. Look, I don’t know what you think I can do here, but if you think that receiving more As in history classes would have prevented the situation you’re in now—”

Adam had misstepped and he knew it, even before Jade’s face contorted into an injured scowl. It was a look much less becoming on a man half a century old than it had been on his 19-year-old counterpart, and it made Adam feel tired. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quietly, pointlessly, even as Jade began to rage about how he wasn’t in any _fucking_ sort of situation and he’d been writing like _fucking_ crazy lately, no _fucking_ thanks to Adam, and if Adam didn’t mind he’d be off right _fucking_ now to carry on with all the _fucking_ creative accomplishment that still came so _fucking_ naturally to him despite all of Adam’s fascist _fucking_ efforts to stamp it out of him and, just in case anyone was _fucking_ wondering, he’d gotten perfectly fine marks in history, which was, incidentally, a stupid _fucking_ subject for stupid _fucking_ fascists, thanks very much.

Adam bit his lip. Adam tried not to laugh. Adam even managed to hold back until Jade had cleared the kitchen to dissolve into peals of laughter. His admirable self-restraint earned him nothing but a slammed study door and the unmistakable sounds of Jade’s file cabinets receiving yet another unrequited kicking.

 

 _Another C. Perfect_ , thought David Marchand, holding his paper in slack hands as his heart dropped out of his chest. His grade-point average was taking one hell of a beating this semester, between this stupid history elective, organic chem, advanced rhetoric, and calculus. Another C was just what he needed—he was sure that nurses with C averages were in high demand all over the country. He wondered if they’d print ‘Barely Made It’ on his diploma, assuming they even gave him one. Damn it, but he was just going to have to kill himself. Midterms were in a week and Carson was just another professor out to fail him.

He’d done well on this paper. At least, he’d thought he had. He’d done a lot of research for it, at least, and spent a lot of time poring over paintings and scrounging for insight. The writing was pretty good, too, even if he’d gotten a bit carried away with it. He didn’t know what he could have done better. As he read over the teacher’s comments, eyes lingering morosely over the word ‘rubric’ underlined at least three times in red pen, his stomach followed his heart in its several-story plunge. Prof. Carson had just given him a C—why did he need to see him after class? To do a victory dance? To point and laugh?

Davey felt ill. The rest of lecture passed by in a blur; he didn’t hear a word Professor Carson said. Which was just excellent, he moaned silently. With midterms in a week, it was the penultimate time to miss out on half a lecture in his worst subject. He probably should have written a fill-in-the-blank paper on the French Revolution like all the other students had. He shouldn’t have done any of the creative bullshit he’d tried to pull off, thinking he was clever, thinking that the A this paper would earn him would pull up his grade and save him. All he’d done was sharpen the next nail for the lid of his coffin.

What would happen, he wondered wildly, if he just dropped out? If he said ‘screw nursing’ and waved all the pain-in-the-ass college requirements goodbye. He could get a job in retail and chip away at his student loans, earning minimum wage and telling everyone who would listen that he was just a few credits short of his associate’s. He could still write in his free time, he consoled himself gloomily. That had been the plan all along, not that classes and clinicals left him a lot of time for writing anyway. Well, fuck it, Davey decided. He’d just jump off a bridge then. Solve everything.

“David?” Carson’s voice interrupted his histrionic suicide pledge. “Why don’t we head to my office,” the professor prodded, and Davey lurched back to the reality of a totally empty classroom. He crumpled his paper in his fist and stuffed it into his messenger bag, which he nearly hung himself with as he tried to swing it over his shoulder. Prof. Carson watched the debacle mutely, standing at the bottom of the stadium seats, waiting patiently. His face was expressionless, even as Davey felt a hot red blush color his cheeks. He looked at his feet and mumbled an apology as he at last reached the bottom of the steps. Carson spared him a tight smile and strode out of the classroom, leaving Davey to scurry along in his wake on much shorter legs.

Davey had always liked Prof. Carson. He wondered what was going to happen once they reached the man’s office. Would he berate Davey for his idiocy? Would he expel him from the class? Had his paper really been so terrible that it warranted face-to-face humiliation?

Prof. Carson’s office was surprisingly small and dark, weak sunlight trickling through the single grubby window. Davey sat without invitation in one of the worn leather armchairs facing the desk, not realizing ‘til the leather shrieked embarrassingly beneath him that he should have waited to be invited. Prof. Carson sat behind his own desk and smiled at Davey, looking a little amused. Was it funny, Davey wondered? Was whatever he had to say that was so awful it couldn’t be written on the bottom of his paper with the rest of the insults amusing as well? If that was the case, he just couldn’t wait to get started.

Davey realized he was glowering at his professor and toned down the doom a little bit, still aware that he was sweating and shaking, hoping that only the latter was noticeable. “Guess my paper was pretty awful, huh,” he said weakly, not even able to produce laughter to back up his lame attempt at humor.

“It was really quite well written, actually,” Prof. Carson said, looking surprised. “That’s why I wanted to speak to you.”

Davey was immediately suspicious. “You gave me a C,” he blurted, without meaning to. “If we’re here to talk about my paper being good, why’s there a red letter C on it?”

Prof. Carson cleared his throat and shifted a stack of papers on his desk uncomfortably. Davey thought he might actually spontaneously combust. He couldn’t believe he’d just _said_ that. To a _professor_. It was almost like he was trying to get chucked out.

A little impatiently, Prof. Carson said, “Yes. Well. If you review the attached rubric, you will see that—” He cleared his throat again, brow creasing in irritation. “We’ve gotten off topic,” he said, sounding only slightly less harried. “I intended to congratulate you. I showed your paper to my department head and we agreed that this is a… well, it’s a beautiful piece of work, David.”

“Davey,” he was horrified to hear himself squeak, correction the man who had shown his paper to the _department head_ , the man who had brought him to his office to tell Davey that his writing was beautiful. He couldn’t believe himself—C be damned, you let a man like that call you anything he wants.

Prof. Carson looked only slightly put off. “Yes, of course, Davey. I wanted to commend you on your evident talent and make an offer. Ah—if you’d met the criteria a little better and given me a Works Cited sheet, it would have been an A.” Davey wondered what part of this statement, exactly, was an offer, and was on the point of asking when Prof. Carson stopped fiddling with his pen cup long enough to say, “The thing is—well, the thing is, I can’t justify a higher grade but I’d like to, so I thought I’d offer to go over your midterm project for you before you hand it in, just to make sure it’s on track.”

The professor seemed extremely uncomfortable with his offer and able unable to hold Davey’s gaze for any length of time. He kept directing the attentions of his intensely blue eyes and really quite massive hands to trifling bits of disorganization adorning his desktop. Davey himself was unsure of how to proceed. This degree of helpfulness from a professor was either indicative of mental handicap or veiled request for sexual favors, and Davey liked to think to think he didn’t look the sort of student to be involved in either. But he didn’t want to be rude, and he would certainly like to boost his grade-point average, and for an old guy, Prof. Carson was still pretty hot—especially if you liked a bit of scruffy disheveledness and found grey hairs to be distinguishing and sexy—so he didn’t want to say no, either. Davey gave his professor a once-over as covertly as possible, although with the man’s eyes fixed so resolutely on the surface of his cluttered desk there was no real threat of discovery. His clothes were a little rumpled, but well-coordinated; if he was a bit soft around the middle, at least he hadn’t lost any musculature in his thick arms and across his chest; and the auspicious lack of a wedding band cheered Davey that, while being a strumpet, he would at the very least not be a homewrecker.

He had given head for worse things than an A in honors history, and that was a fact.

“Er—yeah,” Davey said, treading carefully. “Okay. But I’ve never really done this before—I mean, should I come by your house, or…? Do you even live on campus?”

Prof. Carson looked even more off his ease. He looked up from his desk at last and said, “I do, in fact. But surely my office would be more appropriate? I suppose even the classroom after the room’s cleared out a bit would be all right, if you have another lecture to get to.”

Davey gulped audibly, feeling that the situation had spiraled out of his control rather quickly. “The classroom?” he repeated. Jesus, was this a regular habit? He reassessed the man he’d always found to be, if somewhat impossible about rubrics, quite likeable. Pervy old bastard, though, wasn’t he? Getting blown by subpar students in the _lecture hall_? The extreme shadiness of it made him reconsider. Hell, the whole idea of actually doing the thing made him reconsider. He wasn’t _that_ desperate.

A bemused look on his pervy old face, Prof. Carson said dismissively, “Well, anyway, it’s just an offer. I hate to give low marks to such a talented student, of course, but it’s your preference.”

Was it just him, or was there something distinctly sinister about the way Prof. Carson said ‘talented’? Davey suppressed a shudder. Sensing his discomfort—and rightly so, filthy bastard! Davey crowed self-righteously—Prof. Carson got to his feet and proffered a hand. “Thank you, David—Dav _ey_ , I apologize—for taking the time to meet with me. I’ll see you in class Wednesday, then. Don’t forget—midterm’s due a week from today.”

Davey could barely bring himself to shake the old pervert’s hand, let alone return his smile. He’d never been more relieved to get out of a faculty office in his life.

 

 

 

“…and I was considering it, too, before he asked me to do it in the lecture hall while the other students left the room!” Davey cried later that night. He had not been shaken by his encounter insofar that he was not now quite prepared to relive it, much to the hilarity of his friends Tabitha and Nick. Their raucous response to the retelling of his blatant propositioning had gotten them ejected from the library a few moments ago, and he was still recounting the finer points as they trudged through the cold and the slush to Tabby’s apartment. Tabitha was a fat, no-nonsense Indian girl, with round brown cheeks and straight black hair and what she called a ‘deep and abiding appreciation for the female form’ and Nick called ‘insatiable lesbian nymphomania’. Nick was tall and built with a prize-winning grin and a habit of wooing Tabby’s girlfriends, and could have been much more popular than he was if he’d chosen to take the spot on the baseball team he’d been offered. Davey had known him since high school and thought that the best part about being friends with the incongruous pair of them was probably the utter lack of sexual tension. Really, where could you really get that in this day and age? If you can’t even get it in your own history class… He supposed that the worst that could happen was that he could pine after Nick but, having been confronted with the man’s dangly bits a vast number of times, knew he wasn’t missing anything spectacular and was quite certain he wouldn’t have been able to stand Nick for a moment as a romantic partner, seeing as he could barely stand him as a friend most of the time.

“What are you going to do?” Tabby asked when her giggle died down, pushing a glossy chin-length lock of hair out of her face. “I mean, you can’t exactly show up to class on Wednesday, can you?”

This hadn’t occurred to Davey. “Um, why not?” he asked.  
Nick hooted in answer. “Because he totally expects you to blow him on Wednesday, idiot! ‘I’ll see you in class’ and ‘don’t forget, paper’s due Monday’? How much more blatantly can a man say ‘blow job Wednesday or I’m flunking you’ without losing his job?”

“Be nice to him!” Tabby ordered, elbowing Nick in the ribs. “He’s Carson’s _talented student_ , we can’t expect him to be clever!” They dissolved into laughter again.

“Like I’m the only one who would blow Professor Carson for an A!” Davey protested futilely. “I mean, he’s pretty cute for a dirty old lech, isn’t he?” There was a conspicuous silence as Tabby stifled a giggle and fished her keys out of her backpack. “Isn’t he?” Davey repeated, voice rising a little hysterically as he followed his snickering friends into the warm of Tabby’s apartment.

 

 

 

It wasn’t until the weekend hit that Davey changed his mind. It wasn’t a sudden and rash decision, as he’d already accepted his midterm was shit and he was doomed to fail. Having committed to that course of action, he’d gone ahead and ditched on Wednesday and planned to continue on to be flunked on Monday without even coming within spitting distance of pervy old cock.

It was a very specific event that changed Davey’s mind. It was the realization that he was the current owner of three Cs and one lonely A and, if he failed Carson’s history class, not only would his grade-point average take its final plunge off the face of his résumé, but he would have to choose between killing himself and not being accepted into the school’s nursing program by merit of remaining a single humanities credit short of his Associate’s in science.

Suicide was clearly the more attractive option, but it was hardly an either-or situation. He could also turn up on Prof. Carson’s doorstep, say “explain this rubric to me _line by line_ ” in the sexiest voice he could muster, and tear off Carson’s pants like they had snaps down each leg.

How bad could it be? he mused as pushed aside his organic chemistry homework in defeat. Certainly one blowie was less terrible than working at Wal-Mart for all eternity. And it would be in the comfort (‘comfort’ being a relative term) of the professor’s own home, not in a lecture hall of dwindling occupation. It gave Davey chills just imagining what an A in an honors course would do to his GPA and, subsequently, his chances of being accepted into the nursing school.

Before he was really fully aware of deciding anything, Davey had run a comb through his snarled bedhead—needed a haircut, his bangs were falling in his eyes again—and thrown on some chapstick, gathered up the pages of his shoddy excuse of a pretense and was heading across campus. He hadn’t even hit the quad when he realized he’d left his dignity in his dorm, but he figured he wouldn’t need it where he was going and pressed on.

 

 

Frowning, Adam hurried to answer the summons of the doorbell before Jade had a heart attack over being interrupted. He was beyond surprised to open the door only to reveal a grimacing David Marchand, from his French history course, on the threshold. It was not an eventuality he had prepared himself for. None of his students had ever seemed fond enough to so much as stop by his office, let alone his home. He wondered if David—it was Dav _ey_ , damn it—was stalking him. He certainly did not recall either furnishing his student with his address or inviting him to drop by and, though his memory was not what it had once been, he rather thought neither even had transpired.

So that was stalking, then. Wasn’t it?

The time frame for socially correct expressions of pleasure and surprise had elapsed while Adam struggled to reconcile his student and his doorstep in his mind. He settled for a somewhat strangled-sounding “Er, hello”.

Davey offered up a coquettish smile and said in an ominously significant way, “I thought you could tell me more about your rubric.”

Adam didn’t know what to make of this. Davey had seemed unreceptive to the suggestion and hadn’t even shown up for his last class. Adam had been embarrassed—the only reason he’d even made the offer in the first place was because of the guilt trip Jade had laid on him. That kind of thing went against what he believed in, as an educator. Clearly it had been an error of judgment that had made his student uncomfortable, and he had been relieved when Davey had not shown up in class to make good on Adam’s offer.

And now this.

Well, Saturday had not been going well anyway; to hell with it. Adam suppressed a sigh and said, “Yes, of course,” and ushered Davey inside. If he was not mistaken, Davey licked his lips at him. Adam shook himself—imagining things. He was imagining things.

Trying resolutely to refrain from shame at the size or state of his home, Adam led Davey to the kitchen. They sat at the table and Adam offered drinks—to which Davey replied, oddly, that he’d rather just get it over with—and Davey laid the typed sheets of his midterm on the table. No, this time Adam was sure, he was _definitely_ licking his lips suggestively. Adam simply didn’t know what to make of that. He had been hit on by students before, most notably an aggressive female at his former post who had ultimately forced his resignation by submitting sexual orientation-related complaints to the board and leading protests, but he’d been much younger and more attractive at the time. Davey’s attempted flirtation was not even flattering; Adam was, honestly, a little concerned. That kind of promiscuity aimed at men like Adam could not be healthy in a 20 year old.

“Do you have any specific questions, or did you just want me to read over what you have here?” Adam asked conversationally, hoping that if he ignored the flirting it would go away.

“Is the kitchen good for you? Should we, um, go upstairs?” Davey blurted suddenly, nervously, showing his youth.

Not going away on its own, then. Adam took a deep breath and asked the last question he wanted an answer to. “You didn’t come here about your midterm, did you?”

Davey looked exasperated, as if the answer to Adam’s inquiry was frighteningly obvious. “I came here for the sex, didn’t I? As long as you—um—don’t have herpes or anything. I mean, because you seem to do this a lot, and I don’t want—”

Adam recovered from his shock in time to derail the rest of Davey’s sentence with a low, strangled groan. He was all too aware that whatever mistaken assumption had brought Davey here would likely cost him his job. “David, I want to make it very clear to you that I do not want to, nor have I ever wanted to, engage in sexual activity with you,” he said seriously, suppressing his gut reaction of fluster and panic. A small part of him wanted to interrogate his student as to what had given him that impression _exactly_ , so that he could avoid the behaviors in the future. “If I somehow misled you, I apologize,” he added with emphasis.

He couldn’t believe this had happened, was happening, to him. He wanted to tell Jade—not the Jade in the other room, but the Jade of his youth, the one who would have laughed til he cried and teased Adam mercilessly for months.

Davey looked seriously put off. “But you said… I mean, when you said you’d look over my midterm…”

“What I meant was ‘I’ll look over your midterm’, yes,” Adam said firmly.

Davey looked up at him, eyes wide. “So… there’s no chance of trading sexual favors for an A in your class? I mean, just to clarify?”

Adam suddenly found his laughter a willful thing, difficult to contain. “Correct,” he said, hoping Davey couldn’t hear the suppressed outburst of hilarity in his voice. “None whatsoever.”

“Huh,” said Davey and then, apparently swept by realization, a hot blush spread across his cheeks and his forehead hit the table with the thud. “Oh my god,” he moaned into the wood. “I am so, so embarrassed.” He tipped his head to the side so he could squint up at Adam with one eye. “You’re totally going to fail me now, aren’t you?”

Adam couldn’t decide if he should beat his student’s head in or laugh out loud. He chose to say, in a carefully controlled voice, “In case I haven’t been clear, the _only thing_ that will affect your grade in my class is your class performance.”

Davey’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You’re not going to grade me with a bias because I thought you were propositioning me?” Davey’s mouth dropped open in fresh horror. “Or because I’m apparently the type of person who would whore himself out to his horny old professor for a higher grade?” His voice climbed nearer and nearer to hysteria and he hid his face again.

“I assure you that while both are very troubling to me,” Adam said, letting a soft chuckle escape because he couldn’t hold back much longer, “I will continue to grade your work as I did before this incident.”

Davey moaned again. “Fat lot of good that does me,” he mumbled into the table. “I’ve got a C in your class.” Suddenly he lifted his head from the table to scowl at Adam. “You know, you’re a real bastard about your damn rubrics. Your expectations are not as explicit as you’d think.”

“That has recently become apparent to me,” Adam said, and at last could hold back the tide no longer. He burst out laughing.

Davey stared at him horrified for only a moment longer before he, too, saw the humor of it and began to laugh.

 

 

The laughter was the last straw. The doorbell, the weird thumping, the voices—these things he would let slide, because Jade Puget was a gracious man, patient and forgiving. But the braying pack of wild dogs—that was more than even Mother Theresa would have tolerated, and if Mother Theresa wouldn’t have stood for it Jade certainly wasn’t going to either.

He threw open his study door with a bang, relishing the way the drywall gave beneath the force of the door handle. It made him feel justified, properly angry. He stormed to the source of the laughter, preparing a rant suited for just such an occasion.

When he reached the kitchen, he stopped dead.

There was a man at the kitchen table. He was a young man, and a beautiful one. That was what struck Jade first—the beauty of the crinkled, laughing face, the glow of youth and that which had left him, possibility. Black hair fell into laughter-squinted eyes. His skin was pale. The dark eye spilled mirthful tears onto round cheeks. Stranger still, Adam was laughing too.

Jade tried to place the man. He looked too young to be a colleague, but Jade had never met one of Adam’s students before. It seemed unlikely that one would be here, in his kitchen, giggling.

“Hello,” Jade said evenly, cutting their laughter short with the challenge in his greeting. “Who are you?”

Adam tried very hard to wipe the smile off his face but couldn’t manage, Jade noted sourly. “J, this is Davey Marchand, from my 220 section. Davey, this is my partner Ja—”

Jade didn’t let Adam finished the introductions. He had crossed the room and thrust his hand to Davey to shake. “Jade, I’m Jade,” he said, suddenly spellbound by the young man, recognizing the name from the margin of the paper he’d read over and over, filled with yearning for the bright and manic days of his youth. “You wrote that paper—‘Desperate Men’, wasn’t it?”

Davey shook Jade’s hand, eyes still wet from mirth, looking at once guilty and surprised. “Uh, yeah. Are you a professor too? I mean, do you teach here?”

“I’m a composer,” Jade said with more ostentation and pride than he’d garnished his title with in years. He felt giddy, light-headed. He could smell Davey, soap and sweat and skin. Half-lucid, he was convinced he’d never smelled anything like it. He boasted shamelessly, as from a fog, barely aware of Adam’s presence. “Puget, the last name’s Puget. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but my most popular piece was always—”

“The adagio from the Thousand Year Score,” Davey interrupted. Jade was gratified by a look of pleasure on the man’s face. Few enough people knew his name, let alone what he’d done. Davey began to hum a few bars of the piece, voice clean and clear and skillful, and Jade was too swept off his feet to wonder where he’d heard it. “Amazing stuff. Is it finished yet?”

Jade’s euphoria took a small dive at that. Before he could recover, Adam spoke, smiling openly. Jade recognized a kind of delirious happiness on the familiar features, one that was reserved for Jade himself, and a sort of amazement one usually found on the sticky faces of children. “It’s a work in progress,” Adam said, beaming from young to old and back again. “Like your midterm here.” He gestured with the pages, as if to put the meeting back on track. Jade resented this—he supposed he’d been meant to stay locked up in his study, the beast in his tower, and never interrupted, but he was feeling uncooperative. Just looking at the talented young man made him feel stronger, younger, more alive.

“May I?” Jade asked impetuously, using his most charming voice and smiling at Adam and Davey both. “It’s just that your last paper was so beautiful,” he added, feeling a little self-conscious and not knowing why.

The student blushed, trying to hide his grin behind his hands. “I—um, thank you, I—”

Jade felt as if he’d done something weird, something wrong. The stunned, sideways glances Adam kept shooting him only reinforced this suspicion. For all that longtime couples reserved the privilege of communication with a glance, he didn’t want to meet Adam’s eyes. He did his best to backtrack, to get away from the blushing boy at the table and the concern on Adam’s too-familiar face. “Anyway, send me a copy when it’s finished, if you think about it,” he said as coolly as possible, feeling awkward and humiliated and exposed in ways he hadn’t since high school.

He escaped for his study before he could make it worse. Safe within its familiar grey confines, Jade asked himself what was wrong with him; but all he could think of was the way it had felt, looking at Davey, and the way it had sounded.

Jade scrabbled for a clean sheet of paper and a pencil. Fuck the third movement, the bloated scherzo, the stasis it described, the anger. He’d scrap it as soon as salvage it, his work of the last decade, so long as he could integrate this new sound. If his symphony was the journey of a man, if it was a man’s life, than surely the third movement should not be festering waste, the rot of age, twilight and the slow march of death. Instead—yes, beginning to scribble with impassioned violence, seeing Davey’s white face on the lined page—instead, the third movement would be the sound of fire, burning to ash all that the allegro and adagio had built, the triumphant song of flinging oneself into the flames and starting from less than scratch, behind born of annihilation. The third movement would be a new life, and not just for the symphony. A contented smile began to spread across his face as he dashed heavy black lines through not just measures but whole pages of the limping adagio, imposing new lines and bold sounds and letting a whole new mood sweep his second movement’s circular despair. The third movement, that glorious sound he’d seen in Davey’s eyes, would be a new life for _him_.

End Notes:

Thanks again, ladies and gents. Drop a review, help me improve!

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	3. Hail Mary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! Thanks for coming back for more. I don't own the boys, and none of this ever happened.
> 
> This is a short one, and it comes with a warning: Updates might slow down soon because I'm really struggling with chapter 5. We'll see, we'll see. I'm doing my best to push on! Since its inception--and the first scene of this story came to me a long time ago, well before The Midnight Runner was ever dreamed--I have had to fight for this story. It eludes me, and a single scene is a hard-won battle, one that leaves me exhausted and feeling accomplished. Earlier in the week, I was preening and proud because I'd managed to write that day--less than a page, but it was still an accomplishment. So the going is slow, perhaps because this is more intricate than the usual, or perhaps through flaw of my own schedule, but let it be known that I am going to try to do a weekly update for all of you, and any support you can offer is always appreciated.
> 
> On the subject of appreciation--holy hell but you are all making my life with your thoughtful reviews. Having you here with me means a lot. Once again, thank you for reading, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this latest installment!
> 
> Good news for Adam and a crazed Davey up ahead.

“220 midterm today?” Burgan greeted him in the staff room, knowing smile on his face. Adam was juggling his shoulder bag and a towering landslide of graded papers, trying to add creamer to his coffee mug with his freest hand. Adam raised his eyebrows, sparing a harried nod as Burgan relieved him of the papers clamped under his arm. “Here, let me help,” the older man chuckled.

“Thank you,” Adam breathed in genuine relief, gulping scalding coffee sloppily. “I was up all night grading these. For some asinine reason I promised I’d have all their work back by the day of the midterm. I must hate myself.”

Burgan collected his own coffee and scooped up Adam’s sliding stack. “You’ll be glad of it, come semester’s end. Grading midterms always sets me back enough that I’m in real trouble by finals.” They walked together, heading to Adam’s lecture hall by silent agreement. Gratitude to his colleague—his friend—flooded Adam, who was able to move much more freely now that there weren’t papers slipping out of his pinned arm as well as a bulky shoulder bag and hot coffee in the equation. It was small talk again, advice you’d give to a first-year teacher but not to Adam, who was in his third year at Amherst College and his fifteenth year as a teacher. Adam didn’t mind it, though. It was low effort, the cool-but-cordial façade, and it made all the warmer his other, more private interactions with his department head.

They strolled into the lecture hall together, and the students milling about grew silent. The sight of two teachers, most especially their professor paired with the department head, drew a hush across the clumps of young adults, capitalizing on their already ragged midterm nerves. Burgan flashed Adam another smile, taking in the stillness around them. “Seems like you inspire a bit of respect around here,” he said, clapping an almost fatherly hand to his shoulder. Adam wasn’t fool enough to disillusion him. “Looks like we were right to place you on the path to tenure at the last board meeting, eh?”

With those life-changing words, Burgan sauntered out of the classroom, whistling to himself as he went. The students began to decant into seats, folding the little desks over their laps. Some laid finished papers in front of them while others scrambled behind laptop shields. Adam stood stunned, feeling outside of himself, far away and looking it.

 _Tenure._ This, at last, was his real life; the one he’d been so long waiting for. This was what he’d always wanted.

Tenure.

 

 

Davey wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing. The last few days had gone by him in a blur of caffeine, all-nighters, and a certain pair of cool amber eyes. He hadn’t been sleeping, but that was just as well—his midterm had needed more than a revamping, it had needed an entire rewrite. It wasn’t Prof. Carson’s thoughtful notations or insights that had necessitated the rewrite; it was the prospect of giving a copy to the electrifying composer he lived with that prompted Davey to spend himself utterly, to pour everything he had into a whole new paper, a soaring, expansive piece that was pretentious in its scope and pedantic in its verbiage, although Davey would recognize neither of those qualities for years yet. He had never worked as ferociously on anything as he did on that history midterm; he barely ate, he never slept, and he didn’t spare a second thought to his other midterms. He turned in a half-finished lab practical for organic chem and made no attempt to study for his calculus midterm, let alone get a good night’s sleep. In the end he’d been struck with a sudden inspiration for his history paper less than halfway into the test and turned the majority of the thing in blank and scurried off across campus, scribbling blindly into a tattered notebook as he went.

When he was finished, though, the feeling that seized him was unlike any other. It was more that satiation, more than elation. It was utter peace, soul-deep, that filled him with its stillness and its beauty and its calm. It was total happiness, something he’d never quite experienced before. He was exhausted, of course; he was nervous, not about handing the paper in to Prof. Carson, but about presenting a copy to his dark roommate. He had always loved to write, of course, but he had had no idea how happy it could make him, when he gave it his whole self. He realized that he would never be able to devote his whole self to it, either, not as long as he was trying to be a nurse. For the first time Davey began to consider trying to forge a living on art alone; it was a thrilling idea, one he filed away for discussion with the only career artist he knew: Prof. Carson’s housemate, the amber-eyed Jade Puget.

Prof. Carson’s midterm consisted of showing up during the testing period and handing in the assigned paper. When Davey laid his upon Prof. Carson’s desk, the man had held his gaze with kind, smiling eyes. The look on his face was one of fondness and faith; he, of course, was expecting the original paper, the one they’d discussed and refined, not the almost total overhaul that had struck Davey a few hours into that first, sleepless night, when he was too wired to sleep and too raw to masturbate but nonetheless still unable to get Jade’s amber gaze out of his mind.

After giving Prof. Carson his paper, which he was confident he’d receive an A on, though the grade was hard to care about at this point, Davey made a rash decision. There was another copy of the paper in his bag, a copy he’d made hesitantly, unsure of his own intentions. Furthermore, Prof. Carson would be in his classroom for the duration of the testing period, because students could work on their papers until the very end if they so desired. That meant he wouldn’t be at home, and that seemed important to Davey, though he was unsure why. He felt strange, foreign to himself. It was hard to recognize the sleep-starved, high-strung man he’d been, the past few days. He was haunted by a vision of Jade, one he didn’t rightly understand. What he did understand was that, when Prof. Carson had played a recording of The Thousand Year Adagio one day after class, he’d felt something inside him unfold, open it. The music had resounded in him; it had reached out and spoken to him, stirring something deep inside him, and he had felt a high, thin voice rising in his chest to answer. He had known in that moment that if he were to open his mouth and let it, full, resonating harmonies and dissonances of his own would come bursting out; Jade’s music had made him feel alive, had touched him in place he hadn’t known he possessed.

It hadn’t been hard to put that out of his mind. After all, he’d always loved music. One transcendent moment hadn’t been worth much, in the long run. He’d felt something very similar when he looked at the self-portrait of Gustave Courbet’s he’d written that paper about. Congress between his soul and art forms was not entirely new to Davey. He had a habit of feeling things with his whole self, music certainly being no exception. So, after hearing the adagio, he’d enthused to Tabby and Nick for a few days, tried to dig up a recording of it for himself, and when that had fallen through he’d quickly moved on.

The tight, coiled passion in the way Jade had moved. The bound grace struggling to free itself in his willowy limbs. The fire in his eyes. The wisdom, the depth Davey had seen in the lines of his face. The aching sadness, the absolute beauty—these things had brought it all back. With interest.

Hardly aware of a conscious self, because at this point he was doing what he _had_ to and there was no alternative, Davey unchained his bicycle in front of The Armoury and pedaled towards the block of faculty residences, a little over a mile off the quad, in which Prof. Carson’s small, dumpy house was nestled under the shelter of a huge oak tree’s spreading branches. The scene, unimpressive and dingy upon first sight, had taken on a kind of impossible romance to him now.

In his fugue state of new passion, in his madness, in his sleep-deprived and effusive state, Davey pedaled hard. When he at last reached the dilapidated little house, he was out of breath, heart hammering so loudly he was sure it was audible to others. It was impossible to say whether it was his exertion of his wild, unreal imaginings of this moment that caused his blood to thunder through his head, dry-mouthed and dizzy. For an unknowable reason, secrecy surrounding this moment had seemed imperative. His answering machine was choked with crabby messages from Nick and increasingly alarmed inquiries into his well-being from Tabitha. This behavior was not unusual for a sophomore at midterms, of course; dropping off the face of the earth with clammy hands and a heaving breast was a condition that struck down many. But Tabby had seen what he’d done in calculus, the memory of which flooded him with dread already.

Davey quelled the recollection and the anxiety it brought with it and instead peeled his papers out of his backpack with trembling hands. He took a few deep breaths, meant to be steadying, but today he was drunk on the air itself and every inhalation brought giddiness. At last he could delay the moment no further. Irrationally obsessed, and more than a little convinced that the impossibly sexy older man really understood the huge, roiling inclinations and appetites inside him better than himself did, he leaned his bike against the peeling garage door and ascended the crumbling concrete steps to the front door.

He had a fantasy that under the composer’s tender tutelage he could grow, and know himself, and begin to understand the deep beauties of the universe than gnawed at him in Jade’s music, Courbet’s art, and even from inside himself, sometimes. He dreamed of his own potential, and being shaped by Jade’s knowing hands. He dreamed of Jade’s breath hot in his ear, the amber of his eyes going gold with lust—

The feel of the cool, cracked wood of Professor Carson’s door under Davey’s own fist jerked him red-faced from his lascivious reverie. Even as he knocked, he felt his blush spread. Lewd, grossly inappropriate thoughts were banished to the depths of his animal’s brain and he tried to look guileless and accommodating, an oblivious boy running an errand for his professor. Considering his lolita’s heart, it was the reverse of his last visit—pale, quivering interior, coquettish smile plastered to insincere lips. Each time, though, one detail had remained consistent: the pages, the pretense.  
It gave him an idea, that. No matter how innocuous today’s encounter proved, he thought with a thrill, he could return again and again, so long as there were pages pressed in quaking palm. It was impossible to say why he was so drawn towards Jade, towards that moment. Perhaps his dizzy dreams had been lifted from a thousand Hollywood contrivances, a selfless mentor from an inspirational film spliced with too many grainy pornos; maybe it was just an ache within himself, Freudian or otherwise, finally opening up and reaching out for what would soothe it. And maybe it was only the music. Maybe it was only the way music had always felt inside him and the peculiar, intoxicating resonance of reality within Jade’s unfinished score.

All that aside, it was equally impossible to rule out teenage recklessness. In everything he did, that was an inexorable factor. Something a little less than human had churned in his veins ever since puberty, or maybe his first Danzig song. It was that way with everyone his age—everyone real, at least. Everyone who mattered.

This time it was movement from within the dark little house that dragged Davey back to the surface of the word and away from its deep underpinnings. Belligerent footsteps drew nearer, rattling windows in their panes, until the door was thrown open in a kind of frenzied anger, long suppressed and only ever freed in small, violent acts of door-opening.

Davey cracked the least fuck-me smile currently in his arsenal, heart hammering ferric in his throat. Jade towered above him, broad-shouldered and significantly more massive than he remembered, but just as beautiful. He was too narrow to fill the doorway, though not for lack of trying, and Davey saw that the house was gloomy and unlit behind him, even greyer than the late October sky without. As the man looked down on him, his tawny eyes registered recognition.

“You were here earlier this week, with the paper? Adam’s not in,” Jade said slowly, as if so many students dropped in at all hours it was hard for him to tell the difference. This was very probably the truth of the matter, but Davey was stung nonetheless.

“Uh, yeah, but you said you wanted a copy?” Davey squeaked uncertainly, in a child’s high voice, seeking approval, second-guessing everything.

Jade’s giant chest expanded with his deep breathing. A tight little smile constricted his full lips and he visibly shook off some of his frustration, some of the door-tearing aggression. “Of course,” he said, though it sounded forced. Something not unlike shame washed over Davey in hot waves. “Come in.”

“I’m not… interrupting, am I?” Davey asked in his mouse’s voice.

Jade’s smile spread, growing more genuine, almost benevolent. “Actually,” he said, voice low as if he were letting Davey in on a precious secret, “I was composing.” Davey’s body broke out in goosebumps as Jade added conspiratorially, “Would you like to… hear it?”

Davey nodded dumbly, as if his head was unhinged. Delight flashed in the older man’s eyes and Davey, feeling faint, followed him into the dark house, past the kitchen he’d been in before, into a cramped, disheveled study. Jade grinned nervously, tugging a sheaf of papers off the top of the disarray.

“Here,” he said, standing close indeed so they could both see the page. “This is the cello part. This bit here—” and he pointed with a long, ink-stained finger—“it kind of goes…” Jade began to hum, free hand making subconscious conductor’s gestures. Jade hummed what Davey guessed was half the page before he stopped, smiling, breathing a little hard. “And, uh, here,” Jade went on, discarding the cello and snatching another sheet. “This part I can play for you.”

He swept a great swath of clutter to the ground, revealing a keyboard. Davey wondered what else lurked unlooked for beneath the creative rubble. The bench, which interpreted a low avalanche as, was not unearthed. Instead, the tall man bent himself over the keyboard, leaving Davey to contend with the vast span of his back, dark blue sweater starting to pull free of the waistband of his brown jeans. Davey found himself struck by the beauty of the man’s lithe body, close enough to feel its coiled, virile heat. As Jade began to play, soaring chords and dancing arpeggios, Davey felt his throat constrict. It was beautiful, as scintillating as the vibrations of his earlier hum, in the same stunning vein, and Davey felt it begin to fill him.

“Here there would be a choral part,” Jade told him as his fingers flew. Something about the music was gnawingly familiar. Finally gathering breath enough to speak, Davey asked, “Is this—? It sounds like—”

It was all he could manage. Jade, halting abruptly in the middle of a measure, craned his neck to peer back at Davey. “Yes,” he said, a kind of curiosity in his voice. “It’s the adagio from my score. Part of it, anyway. The end. I’ve made some changes. It’s like a half-movement, the bridge between the second and third. I’ve found that the sound I’d planned has… changed. What do you think?”

“I… it’s beautiful,” Davey choked out, though the word felt insufficient. It was all he could do to say “it” instead of “you”.

Jade smiled again, brows drawn, a question in his eyes. “Do you… know the adagio well?”

Davey didn’t, having only heard it once; but the music, in its rich sadness, had stayed with him, stuck to his bones, caught in his throat. He nodded his lie.

Jade’s face brightened even as shyness drew over his features. “I wonder… would you mind… could you sing the choral part? While I play? When you were humming the other day, I noticed… you have a good voice, a very nice voice.”

Hearing this suffused Davey with a giddy glow, a periphescent strength. Not only did he have a ‘very nice’ voice, but Jade _did_ remember him—remembered him well. The dizzy throb of heat at the base of his spine pushed him to say, “I can try.”

Jade grinned, and it looked out of place on his drawn face. The light in his eyes made Davey feel unbelievably lucky to be alive; and to him, misplaced or not, the smile was beautiful.

Jade began to play. In the moments before he was cued to start, Davey let the sound grow bigger than it was, pour into his skin, fill him to bursting. His eyes fluttered closed and without any prompting, he _felt_ his moment, and started to sing. Clumsy but full-throated, half-remembered Latin unfolded from a deeper part of him than he knew, more sound than word. Forgetting to be self-conscious, wrapped up in the sound, words and phrases forgotten as soon as uttered reverberated from his lips to fill the room, and soon there was no air, just sound, and Jade broke off playing, choked for breath with tears in his eyes. Still, Davey sang on, voice expanding to fill an entire chorus of voices, finding harmonies inside itself, the music spilling hot within him now.

On a long, low note, the last foreign syllable dropped from his gilt tongue and faded, falling away on quivering air. Save for the sound of Davey recapturing his own spent breath, there was silence.

Davey became aware of Jade’s eyes blazing into him, and he opened his eyes at last. The eerie thrall he’d fallen under peeled away from him in layers, leaving his skin flayed raw and sensitive to the very airborne vibrations of Jade’s thundering heartbeat.

“That was,” Jade said, strangled, breathing as hard. Davey waited for more words, but none came. At last, Jade reached, tentative, towards him. Davey’s heart leapt—this was it.

But it wasn’t. Jade’s hand froze in its trajectory. “May I?” he asked, and Davey belatedly realized he’d been reaching out for the paper stupidly clutched to Davey’s concave chest. Embarrassed, Davey shoved it into Jade’s hands, face coloring. Of course Jade hadn’t been reaching for him; he’d been stupid to think so. He was older, successful, brilliant—and then there was Prof. Carson. If he was honest with himself, really honest, Davey couldn’t pretend not to have heard Prof. Carson say ‘partner’—couldn’t pretend he didn’t understand the implications of that. And if a brilliant composer was living in a dump like this with a college professor, well, there were some gilded motivations there. From what he’d seen of the two men, of their home, he gleaned the understanding that they’d been together for a long time—years, easily. And what was he, next to love?

He suddenly wanted to grab the paper out of Jade’s hands, seeing it for what it was—and how paltry, how diminished, how _false_ was his elaborate seduction! In that moment he was utterly destroyed. He’d been a fool to come here. He hoped fervently that he hadn’t embarrassed himself, singing, but was sure that he had.

Still, looking into the starry honey gold of Jade’s eyes, feeling the lust tear into him anew, he couldn’t quite regret it. Maybe once the older man read his words—

Davey shook himself. What in hell was he trying to accomplish, here? To tear apart his professor’s relationship on a whim? To drive a stake between them, to be the naïve, eager jailbait on the side? Jade was what, forty? What did he think would happen—they’d run away together, live happily ever after? And all this over what. A song he’d heard once? He didn’t know this man, or anything about him—save that he was beautiful, and that notes that he’d written had awoken something old and long latent inside of him—something ancient, uncivilized, and hungry.

Jade had a look on his face, one Davey couldn’t begin to decipher. “I think it’s best that you go,” he said quietly, softening the blow by adding, “I look forward to reading this. Thank you.”

Trying bravely not to let his disappointment show, Davey nodded, not trusting his voice. After all, it had betrayed him once before, the fallow flavor of Latin still restless on his tongue. He let Jade show him to the door and didn’t say a word as it closed behind him. That was it; it was over. He’d never see Jade again.  


End Notes:

That's what _he_ thinks.

Thanks for reading, and you know I'd love it if you dropped your thoughts into that little box down there and sent them off to me! I'd also like to ask you all to tell me a little about yourselves, especially those of you who don't write for the site. I put a lot of myself into what I write, so I feel like anyone who's been through one of my stories understands me pretty well--so don't be strangers! I'd love to return the favor.

Thanks, all. Love.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	4. Congress

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU ALL for your amazing reviews! I think you’ve got more insight into my characters than I do at this point, and the feedback you’re giving me is helping me to make them more real, inspiring changes, and even fleshing out themes I wasn’t initially aware of existing. Words cannot express my love and gratitude. I may be repetitive in my adoring responses to your comments, but I try to be at least half as thoughtful as you have been in reviewing, so know that any and all praise and dithering gratitude is sincere! Having read your amazing reviews, I’d once again like to invite the enterprising among you, my most loyal, to pen a summary for me. Credit will, of course, be given, but your grasp of my characters and the emotions therein have rather staggered me, and I already feel that you could summarize them with more justice than I’m able to. Much love.
> 
> Moving on, I don’t own the boys, and this hasn’t happened yet—who knows what the future may hold! You’ll notice that I fucked with Jade’s birth date, but it’s an AU, and I either had to push back his and Adam’s years of arrival or write this twenty years in the future, which would have been weird and contextually challenging. Little stuff, I know, but still.
> 
> Aaaand, most importantly, this here is what you’ve all been waiting for, especially those of you who have been with me from the start. That’s right: what you’re about to read is pretty much hard-core porn compared to the way I usually write around sex. Don’t be deterred if that’s not your thing, however; in Jade’s own upcoming words, the forthcoming smut is visceral but vague. No gritty details, because I’ve not been bodysnatched and still possess the puerile aversion to anything too graphic, but there’s still plenty to satisfy—if I do say so myself.
> 
> Had enough of me yet? Thought so. With no further ado, read on!

For the first time in nearly a month, they made love that night. Laying on his back in the wake of passion he’d long forgotten, Adam breathed a contented sigh. “I love you,” he said dreamily, squeezing at the fingers intertwined with his own. To his immense post-coital delight, like signals reaching the brain and racing back down through the body, as if they were a single firing organism, Jade responded with a quick pulse of his own, pressing their palms together. He rolled into Adam, fitting his chin into the sweaty hollow of Adam’s collarbone, their bodies measured each against the other. He slung an arm over Adam’s somewhat paunchy stomach and nuzzled his neck, and Adam was too dazed by happiness to question his good fortune. They had wasted hours laying this way, once upon a time; drifting in and out of sleep, utterly spent and so in love, Jade’s long leg thrown across Adam’s shorter, thicker one, their bodies matched for size and heat: Jade’s mass in height and length, Adam’s in broad shoulders, wide hips, and braided muscle in between.

Silently, to himself, Adam credited this unlooked-for tenderness to the black night he’d defied Jade and come home drunk. It seemed strange, perhaps, to attribute this tentative peace to such an act of open hostility and deceit; but anyone who found such things strange had not played the dangerous game of loving Jade for 30-odd years and couldn’t dream of understanding the convoluted paths they’d traveled. Sometimes open defiance was the only road back from the edge—and Adam was, he learned again and again, a man who’d walk whatever road it took, whether to heaven or hell or the no man’s land in between, when it came to Jade.

He lifted his head just enough to press his lips to Jade’s forehead, nestled near his chin, and tasted salt. This, Adam knew, was a good moment—one of the best. It wouldn’t last, because moments never did, but for now, as ever, it was more than enough. Old resentments and yesterday’s disloyalties seeped out of his body, melting into the mattress and, at least until they crawled back in come morning, Adam Carson knew nothing but love.

 

 

For Jade Puget it was a different story. Adam’s body had sated the hunger in him for now, for a precious moment, and he bought off guilt with snuggling affection of the sort that Adam lived for. What burned in him tonight were eyes of brown, not blue; skin of snow, not gold; locks of silken midnight, not coarse earth. It was the boy—the student—Davey. God, how the name thrummed in his ears, catching his breath in his throat with its power! God, how even the most sated corners of his soul ached with need for that fragile bird’s body, those hollow bones.

It wasn’t just the words, though the thought of Davey’s pages secreted away in his study set needles to his raw-rubbed skin. And it wasn’t just the untapped youthful beauty. What had pushed him from mere admiration, mundane envy, had been the young man’s voice, the life it had breathed into the humbled offering of his notes, coaxed from the keyboard. The memory of that sound, of their sounds together, had made his heart race and skin flame; it had been all he could do to push Davey out the door before he was on his knees, taking himself in hand. He had passed the hours of Adam’s absence pacing, reading and re-reading, bringing himself to orgasm again and again and, a time or two, screaming with the pointless fury of it, of the singularity that was his lust.

He had jumped Adam on the threshold, desperate to vent his desires into receptive flesh; that it was the wrong flesh had not mattered, had barely registered, so long as he could claw and bite and lick and tear and sink into something. That first time, hot and urgent in the kitchen, he had loved Adam for not being Davey, for being his own, for scouring the thoughts of other flesh from his livid mind—but he’d found that no sooner had he spent himself, no sooner had he slipped slick out of Adam, than his dick once again stirred to life, scalding hot in his belly and unbearable. He had moaned, then, and spoke his first word to Adam since that morning: again, he said, over and over, begging, rubbing himself over Adam’s sweat-stung skin. Overwhelmed by his own need, the word had disintegrated into mewling pleas by the time they’d kissed and sucked and stripped their way to the bedroom, and while Adam fucked him with the gusto of a man half his age Jade had bitten his lips bloody to stop himself crying out the wrong name, the _right_ name, the name of the man he imagined was inside him even as Adam thrust and shuddered and came. And it was good—being fucked by Adam was always, had always been, _good_ —but it hadn’t been enough, and he had distantly heard himself pleading again, begging that only intensified, grew louder, when Adam’s lips closed around him and Jade cried out, thinking of as soft, as wet, as warm a mouth, and yet a different mouth entirely.

And in this way, vague but visceral, he’d at last met full release; but again, already, he began to feel an itch he was far too exhausted to scratch. It was like being fifteen again, dry-humping Nate passionately in empty classrooms and jerking off ‘til it hurt, ‘til even light touches had been enough to bring tears to his eyes. Or—better, because what had he and Nate dared do but stroke and pull and press?—being 20 again, kissing Trey for the first time and doling out sloppy blow jobs in the bathrooms of clubs they’d snuck into to hear bands, gripped by the first messy limerence of their young lives. Better still—because he could still feel Trey’s clumsy tongue if he concentrated but that was nothing to what came next—best of all, when he was 22, when he met Adam. Jade almost laughed out loud remembering it. He was hard for a week, for a month. Every time he laid eyes on Adam he’d needed a cold shower. It hadn’t been long before they’d found each other out, and as far as Jade remembered, they’d never left the bedroom. He hadn’t been able to control himself. They’d been animals.

And that— _that_ was what it was like. Reckless abandon of self-respect. Total absence of self-control. He was going off the metaphorical rails here, losing all self entirely, in the literal vein of real sex, the kind that counted, the kind that consumed everything in its path, inhuman.

Laying there beside Adam, deep in the throes of this metaphysical torment, what Jade asked himself was why Davey. There were a lot of answers: youth, beauty, talent, potential, music, inspiration. Maybe he wished he could go back and do it over again. Maybe the mythical nurturer in him saw something in Davey, Davey’s writing, that he felt compelled to rescue, cherish, save. Maybe it was the way Davey had sung, the great tantalization of his clumsy purity, his unmarked skin, so unlike Adam’s creased and spotted hide. But Jade knew himself better than that, didn’t he? Wasn’t he so old as to be honest, now, to himself? Didn’t he know that this, Davey, _everything_ , was all about Adam?

Loving Adam. Hurting Adam. Keeping Adam, ruining Adam. Having Adam. Hurting Adam.

Hurting himself.

These thoughts heavy on his mind, Jade snuggled harder against Adam and let himself slip into an uneasy sleep.

 

 

Saturday morning found them crippled by another night of strenuous sex, the third in a row. The last two days, as Adam administered midterms and collected projects and procrastinated over mountains of test papers and essay questions, he found less and less reason to linger in his office and more and more reason to hurry home. And Jade had been waiting for him—vigorous sex, followed by take-out Indian food and red wine, followed by more sex, followed by deep and sated sleep. It was the life he’d imagined for himself when he’d first met Jade, before it had ever occurred to him that he too might grow old. And though he _was_ old now, 50 last February, and ought to know better, part of him whispered that this time, it would last. And he had every reason (save reason itself) to think it—he’d been coming home to, _rushing_ home to, an open study door, a well-lit home, the sound of a keyboard and then ink-stained hands snaking down his pants, lips on his, love and need and happiness panted in his ear.

In fact, he thought with pleasure as he rolled over and yawned, ever since he’d caved on the issue of the Marchand kid’s paper, he hadn’t dreaded coming home even once. Ethics and rubrics be damned, Adam told himself cheerfully; even if the kid’s midterm was shit, he’d give him an A, just for the difference he’d made in his day-to-day life.

The irony being, of course, that he had no way of knowing how correct this light-hearted assumption really was.  
That morning, when the doorbell shook warm bodies from weekend stupor, it was Jade who rose from the rumpled bed, dragging a hand across bleary eyes and smiling. “I got it,” he yawned to Adam, who had responded to the intrusion by drawing a pillow over his head and groaning. “You sleep.” It wasn’t much, that gesture, but it was so unlike what Adam had come to expect from Jade that he shot out an arm and snared his partner’s wrist, tugging him back to the bed.

“Stay with me,” Adam mumbled, dopey with affection, with sleep. Jade peeled off his fingertips, kissing each one, and promised to return.

Himself, Jade too was quite taken with the newfound—or perhaps rekindled; it was so difficult for him to remember if they’d been happy or not—domestic bliss. It could be that he was deceiving himself, but the renewal of his carnal appetites had left him feeling decidedly un-Jade-like. He felt rejuvenated, years younger; and those times when he wasn’t wrapped around Adam he found himself at his keyboard or his desk, composing as if his very life depended on it. (And if he fantasized of someone else, someone younger, when they made love—if he thought of someone else, someone fresher, when he wrote—well, what of it? Surely it was not so unusual for a man of his age to take to make believe. Surely it meant nothing.)

Even as he plodded down the stairs Jade hummed to himself, a happy little song that had nothing to do with despair or immolation or any of the thematic entities, new or old, of his symphony. In fact, it sounded more like an instant coffee jingle, and for once Jade wasn’t bothered by that. So he’d come up with a nice jingle. That wasn’t creative damnation, it was a nice chunk of cash that that could use to spend Christmas break somewhere sunny and far, far away from Davey Marchand.

On the stoop, Melanie Burgan was radiant. Jade wondered if glowing smiles where standard issue in her doubtlessly charming Texas hometown, or if hers was aftermarket, orthodontia and WhiteStrips. Her golden hair curled neatly around her doll’s face and she looked altogether too pretty for a Saturday morning, a full-length red pea coat belted around her neat waist. The resentment this might normally have spurred, however, was conspicuously absent. Instead, he found himself pleased to see her. Overnight she must have been elevated in his esteem from inexorably likeable neighbor to close confidant, because he heard himself greet her with a cheerful exaltation. “Mellie! I’m glad you stopped by, I’ve got the best news.”

Mellie had the decency not to drop her jaw in awe and disbelief. Instead, she beamed back at him, pressing a hand to her stomach. “Go on, then!” she bubbled, matching his enthusiasm note for note.

“My symphony—I think I’m finishing it for good this time. Today I’m setting in on the third movement in earnest, and everything’s working together just beautifully.” He said it proudly, excitedly, without humility or self-deprecation or doubt. God bless the fire Davey Marchand had set inside of him, he praised silently. God bless the new vigor for music, for life. (And was he such a fool for trusting it to last?)

For her part, the professor’s young wife was literally struck silent by delight. “Oh, Jade,” she breathed at last, gathering her wits. “Jade, that’s just wonderful! You know how Mr. Burgan and I feel about your work—you must come over for brunch! We’ll celebrate. I’m making waffles with strawberries, and we can open a bottle of champagne.”

Uncharitable comments about alcohol consumption at 10 a.m. bubbled within him, hurtful asides to fire at Adam that he reined in, catalogued, and swallowed. “All right,” Jade said instead, shocking them both. “I’ll drag Adam out of bed. Just give us 30 minutes.”

 

 

It took 45. First there was the matter of coaxing Adam out of bed, and he took Jade’s very proximity as an invitation to pull him down onto the comforter and cocoon him in stubborn limbs. Then there was the shower, which Adam insisted they take together, turning a 5-minute rinse into a 20-minute haze of kissing and groping, soap and sex and release. And then—and Adam blamed Jade for this—something about the way he toweled off sent Adam into a frenzy that had ended with Jade’s sweaty collapse on the bed, Adam on his knees looking smug, Jade’s cum and the coy suggestion of another shower on his lips.

At last, they were both clean and clothed and out the door, hands laced together and Adam’s lips against neck until the last possible second before Hunter Burgan invited them in. To his credit, if he’d noticed the nuzzling or the marks left behind, he didn’t show it, smiling gaily and welcoming them in.

Though it was an effort not to frown as Hunter and Adam poured champagne in their orange juice, Jade kept his smile in check and didn’t shift out of reach when Adam laid a hand on his leg, rubbing adoring circles with his thumb on the inside of Jade’s thigh. At length, after they’d eaten and chattered politely and Jade had accepted congratulations all around, Mellie got to her feet, crystal goblet aloft. Jade thought he saw a flicker of annoyance cross Hunter’s face, but then he reminded himself he was making an effort, here, and wrote it off as imagination.

“Don’t worry, it’s not champagne,” she said in a jokey voice, though Jade didn’t get the joke. “I think—and maybe Hunt doesn’t agree with me, but—that I’m far enough along now not to worry about jinxing anything.” Mellie, smiling, tried to catch her husband’s eye. Jade chided himself for fabricating reluctance, the lightest scowl. “But I feel like you’re our closest friends here, and I thought you should be the first to know.” She squeezed Hunter’s inert hand in her free one, smiling at Jade—and he knew what was coming now—as she announced, to no one’s surprise, “The mister and I are just a few months shy of welcoming Alexander Lawrence Burgan into the world.”

Smile frozen on his lips, Jade faltered, scrambling desperately for all that he appeared perfectly still. It felt like a system failure, like the rung of a ladder giving way beneath his feet—suddenly he was in open space, free falling. He couldn’t remember what he was supposed to feel, how a normal person would react. What was the appropriate response for the situation? Feeling a little wild as he flailed through a social void—a personal malfunction, some failure to connect to other humans, a bug in the programming that would not be overlooked or taken lightly were it noticed—Jade looked to Adam for instruction, for a cue.

But there was nothing. All eyes were on him, even Adam’s smiling blues. Jade belatedly realized he was last to the news. The spasm of irritation—all this fuss for his benefit?—kicked things back into place. Joy. It was supposed to be joy. “Congratulations,” he said through gritted teeth, unable to tear his eyes from Adam’s. Something dark burned in him, a disproportionate anger, a hatred that was more accessible, easier to understand, than the peaceful hunger that had filled his last few days. Even as Adam turned back to the glowing wife and tight-faced husband, effusing his congratulations and willingness to love every fucking thing, inquiring over the choice of names and seeming truly delighted to learn that Lawrence was a family name, even as Jade wondered how this was so easy for him, why it came so naturally, and if there wasn’t really something missing from him that he couldn’t match it—even as the surface of the world went on, sunny and normal and bright, passing him by, Jade felt it. Jade knew. This was the beginning of the end.

 

 

Jade Puget   


* * *

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

 

_Jade Errol Puget, born in California in the 1960s, is a composer of classical and contemporary orchestra pieces. In addition to 2 sonatas and a minuet, he has written several commercial jingles and is rumored to have worked on backing track for an assortment of alternative rock bands. These are his only completed works._

Puget’s most notable work, The Thousand Year Score, is a four-movement 18th century “classical style” symphony. Puget has stated that, when completed, it will consist of an allegro, an adagio, a scherzo, and a sonata. Puget finished the allegro in 1997, and has considered the adagio “mostly complete” since 1999. Though not yet finalized, the second movement was a popular concert piece in the early 2000s and was conducted by Puget himself during the ironically brief Thousand Year Tour on the West Coast (citation needed). When questioned about an end date for the project, Puget said that the music would come when it did. The composer has publicly stated that The Thousand Year Score is “the sound of a man’s life; it will be the soundtrack of life’s dizzying descent into nothingness and one man’s journey through it”. Puget has also been noted stating that “life is only a vast ocean of days, money mattering more than meaning, everyone’s eyes too clouded to see anything outside of himself”.

Puget currently lives somewhere on the East Coast, speculatively with his male “life partner” (citation needed). He has not appeared in the media or music communities since the abortive Thousand Year Tour, which was reportedly cancelled after three performances when Puget failed to deliver the new material promised.

 

 

At the time of the break-in, Davey had his headphones on. Being a bit of a masochist, he was listening to a downloaded recording of the unfinished Thousand Year Score, letting the beauty and hurt of it open him up and rub salt into his skin. This digression was easy enough to explain away—either by curiosity, that streak of self-destruction, or by his already established reputation as music freak, one of those kids never far from being plugged in. Less explicable was the window open on his computer screen, the Wikipedia page of a certain composer. Mere curiosity, maybe, had spurred him to research the name in the first place; but whatever force had compelled him to reread the three short paragraphs to the brink of memorization had long ago outstripped curiosity. It had even left self-destruction in its wake. No, even Davey (after jerking off to the thumbnail photograph for the nth time since Wednesday) had to admit that it had gone beyond the realm of anything save obsessive behavior.

Davey’s eyes flickered listlessly over the screen as he hummed along to Jade’s notes, seeing the big, ink-freckled hands that had penned them more than the text. He tried to reason with himself, tried to cajole and coax and implore himself to either move forward with his life or conjure a damned convincing explanation. He tried to puzzle out what it was, exactly, that had stuck him on Jade. In his life, he had dated exactly two girls—high school—and one boy—college, freshman year. But people his own age didn’t do much for Davey. He didn’t like their music or their clothes or their recreation; he didn’t like their drugs and their booze and their indiscriminate sex. Was that why Jade appealed to him? By merit of his age, his difference? Davey didn’t think that was it, or at least not the whole story. While he quivered to think of what he could experience at Jade’s practiced hands, he thought it was the music most of all. It had to be. He didn’t understand what else could have brought on such a mindless fascination.

So he was pondering these things, listening and reading and aching, really just minding his own business, when the break-in occurred.

“This is an intervention!” Tabby’s voice rang out as Davey’s door burst inward, scaring him out of his skin, and Nick hurtled into the room. Davey had time to yelp in terror, and then Nick was on him. The taller, wiry young man knocked him from his desk chair and to the ground. Clearly there had been some kind of tactical planning session, because Nick pinned him and Tabby stomped over without exchanging a word. “This is an intervention,” she repeated at a more palatable volume, towering above Davey’s prone body.

Davey attempted to wriggle free of Nick’s grip, but his friend wasn’t moving. “Yeah, well, thanks for intervening,” he grunted sarcastically. “You know, I’m going to start enjoying this,” he added menacingly to Nick, squirming furiously, accepting that he had lost the strength challenge and would now have to employ terrify-with-gayness tactics.

Having scuffled with Davey before, Nick was prepared for this and didn’t respond. Instead, Tabby stormed over and towered above Davey’s prone form. Her hands were planted on her ample hips and she was aquiver in fury. Her frown alone was a force to be reckoned with, and Davey felt the first wave of guilt. He hadn’t spoken to his friends since he’d relayed the tale of the blow job proposition. He’d just… fallen off the earth. And then, the way he’d behaved at the Calculus midterm—Tabby had seen that. She’d shot him a panicked look, and he hadn’t responded, just ducked his head and powered out of the classroom, sprinted to a computer lab and fiddled around with his paper. God, that paper. Davey was embarrassed, now, to even think of it. It had been fecklessly impassioned, a bloody, redundant plea; and when he tried to match that up to the music he’d heard, sang to—it was just embarrassing.

He had no idea how he was going to explain himself.  
Right on cue, Tabby demanded, “Explain yourself.” He could hear her anger and concern, and the force of it made him shrink. He swallowed hard.

“I—can I—will you please let me stand up?” He scowled at Nick, stalling. Tabby gave a quick nod and Nick removed himself. Grimacing, Davey got to his feet and tried to look dignified. Quelled by the look on his friends’ faces, he sighed. He hadn’t, after all, come up with a plausible explanation for his behavior. “You know, midterms,” he said weakly. “I was busy.”

Nick let out a sudden hoot, narrowed eyes shifting from suspicion to mirth in fractal seconds. “Marchand, you slut!” he cried, laughter breaking up his voice. “You fucked the old bastard, didn’t you?!”

Tabby’s mouth fell into a small, wet O. “He didn’t! You wouldn’t,” she pronounced challengingly.

Davey had to hand it to Nick. There it was, the best—the only—excuse for his disappearing act, his negligence in calculus, even the erratic behavior only he had been privy to. It was quite possibly a seamless explanation; he was tempted to believe it himself. “Well,” he lied bravely, making up his mind, “let’s just say I’ll be getting an A in honors history.”

Later, Davey would wonder why he hadn’t told them about Jade. They were, after all, his best friends. At first glance, it looked like pride, humiliation. But that didn’t feel true, exactly. For all that he thought he’d renounced Jade, given up the starry-eyed dream of whatever-it-was, he was still secreting the man away in his thoughts, his life: still hiding and protecting the attraction, the electric moment in Jade’s cramped study, the chemical tension that had burned every nerve in his body and flayed every inch of his skin. Then and there, he could only see much later, he had made up his mind. Standing there in his dorm, words on his lips, he wasn’t just lying to his friends; he was pledging himself, body and mind, to Jade Puget.

 

 

Music was a fickle bitch.

Really, actually, truth be told—she was a bit of a cunt.

Now, Jade didn’t use that word lightly. He didn’t like to use it at all. It was prudent, he felt, to save a curse word for extreme circumstances, so that you could use it with relish and everyone present would know that you _really_ meant it. Until the age of 13, maybe, that word had been ‘fuck’. (And really, what a glorious word it was. Nice hard consonants, an impassioned vowel, the expulsive force of a gob of venom, laced with just a touch of emphatic spit.) But in the 39 years that had elapsed since that tender age, Jade had come to find that there was no relish left in ‘fuck’. It was pleasant, and it packed a punch, but it had sharply diminished over the years and worked its way into his casual dialect, his stream-of-consciousness, and his everyday dialogue.

That left him with ‘cunt’. It, too, featured a lugubrious vowel fenced by angry consonants. It had the added quality of melting off his tongue like butter, yet emerging so brittle and harsh into the air that it would shatter to pieces whatever space he was standing in. In order to preserve this effect—and because he wasn’t terribly fond of its raw, unsightly quality, for all that he swore with impunity—he uttered it rarely, not even using the word in his thoughts save for in the most dire of circumstances.

The point of this is that Jade Puget calling music a cunt was serious.

As quickly as she had come to him, as she had flowed in and possessed him, as utterly as she had moved him to tear down the past and forge a brilliant, scalding future, she had left him now. And there was a hole in him where the music had been. This hole had been there before, of course—had been there for years. Had been there, in fact, up until a few days ago. The vacancy, the void, had always been unbearable and twisted his heart into blackness. The difference was that, chiseled out over bitter years, he had not had to feel the sting of music’s abandonment all at once. This, now, was different. For a few short days he had held the flame that had burned him in his chaotic youth, the passion and hunger and fire that had captivated and driven him into the life he now lived.

And now it was gone again.

Jade realized now, in the staggering emptiness of music’s absence, what he hadn’t known the first time around, when she had drained away slowly, taking so much of the man he was with her. He realized now that he would do anything— _anything_ —to get it back.

He would scream at Adam, throw things, stir up the foulest fight they’d had in years. He would punch a hole in the drywall that left his knuckles bloody. He would break a glass and shove Adam, barefoot, stumbling backwards into the splinters. He would shriek and howl and cry, finally, when the police arrived, when Adam put on a brave smile to hide his red footprints and assure the officer at the door that no, there hadn’t been any fighting, just a movie turned up too loud, he was very sorry and it wouldn’t happen again. He would fuck Adam, hard, without sufficient warning, without sufficient lube, and he would give up in fury when he was unable to come, no matter what he pictured, no matter whose name he held on his tongue.

And when all that failed him, when Adam sat across the breakfast table with bags under his eyes and bandages on his feet and bruises, deep inside himself, where no one could see them, and said, “Jade, we can’t keep doing this”, when Jade fell into his unwavering arms and cried for the loss inside him and his hatred for himself—when all of these things happened and it changed nothing, he would take things one step further.

He would buy flowers, an apology, a facade, and he would wait outside Adam’s lecture. He would smile and slip inside as the students filed out, and he would squeeze Adam’s hand and apologize for the way he’d acted, and he would swallow the riled pride at making this concession. He would do this for the glimpse it allowed him of the music, of his muse—he would do this, and he did, for a split second of flushed eye contact with Davey Marchand.  
And when that second filled him with unspeakable beauty, with a string of notes and a sound of its own, with the bitch music herself, he knew he would do it again. He would do whatever it took, no matter the consequences. He was tired of hanging on the mercy of his own ingenuity, creativity. He had waited and worked for years, hoping that the music would return. It was only now that he really understood the rules of the game: if she wouldn’t come to him willingly, by his own virtue, he had no choice. He would take her by force.

 

 

 

Adam sat at the kitchen table, Jade’s apology flowers growing more and more ragged before him. Midterms were heaped all around him, corralled by felt tipped red pens. Jade washed dishes at the sink, humming a happy little song to himself, apparently sated by the limping dinner he’d prepared and the highly forbidden fuck in Adam’s school office.

For his part, Adam only felt exhausted. Even as Jade had knelt before him, unzipping his fly with a smirk on his lips, Adam had had to will life into his penis; even as it half-heartedly rose and Jade’s mouth had closed around him, those full pouting lips that had once driven Adam so mad with lust, his eyes had fallen on the round, gleaming circle of nearly bald scalp at the back of Jade’s head, and his thoughts had drifted to their fight. While Jade sucked him off in his office, the stuff of fantasies less than a decade ago, Adam had tried to remember what the fight had even been about. He’d tried to remember words they’d used, phrases they’d slung. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t recall a single detail. All the years, all the fights, they’d blurred together. A day earlier, they’d fought and bled; and now already the reasons why, the weapons used, were obscured to him. He came quick and cold, that too swallowed up by Jade, and realized the truth that stared at him from every mirror, from inside of every thought; it was all the same to him now. It all bled together into one. Every day was exactly the same. Every fight, every fuck—they were just going through the motions. It was all the same as the day before had been, and the day before that.

Thinking that, knowing that, it should have made him feel something. But Adam felt nothing at all.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. He’d felt tired. He’d felt, flickering low within him, a love for Jade, a clammy and exhausted thing itself, barely mustering the strength to brave another day.

And so when he’d come home that night, when he’d seen the table laid and Jade’s proud, nervous smile, he’d returned it. He’d taken Jade into his arms, pressed his lips to Jade’s forehead, murmured thank you, I love you, meaningless praise. He was certain that it wasn’t supposed to be meaningless, that the stir he felt in him at the sight of Jade, Jade’s gesture, ought have been larger, healthier—ought have made him want to scream from mountaintops, laugh and dance and sing. Because wasn’t this what he’d always wanted? Wasn’t Jade trying? Weren’t they here, in it, together, fucking and loving and forgiving and trying, the both of them?

Maybe Adam wasn’t trying anymore.

The very thought chilled him, and Adam shook himself out of dark, pointless thoughts. He was too tired, too old, for thinking them. Of course he loved Jade. He’d always loved Jade—it had been the defining theme of his life, the vein he’d drawn from again and again. It was ridiculous to think that love could wear out, grow as weary and weak as Adam himself. Maybe he was just depressed. Maybe he was just getting older. Maybe this was how everyone felt, sometimes. The point was, his strength failing—no, only wavering—was not something to dwell on or puzzle over. It was something to accept and move beyond, because what else was he going to do?

He was going to get on with things, Adam decided with a smart nod. He grabbed the first midterm off the stack and uncapped his pen. He’d carry on as usual, and he’d make sure to get a good night’s sleep, and he’d be feeling right as rain come morning.

The paper in front of him was Davey Marchand’s. Adam noted this with some relief. He was already familiar with the content of this paper, already knew that it was an A, so long as Davey had made those few changes he’d required. This was a comfort—start small, he told himself, because the tower of paper yet ungraded seeming forbidding, insurmountable. But Davey’s would be easy, and the next one would follow naturally, and the one after that would be the easiest yet because he’d have fallen into a rhythm by then. Unable to shake the dread that had taken hold deep in his gut, he instead disguised it, covered it up, looked away. Adam Carson deceived himself, hardly for the first time, and with a false burst of energy, began to read.

 

 

 

It was not the paper they had talked about. It was not even remotely the topic they’d discussed. There was no trace of the work they’d done, the suggestions and corrections Adam had so gently proposed. In fact, the seven pages in front of him were completely unrecognizable to Adam, save for the largely smothered, piping voice that he could pick out as Davey’s, buried in the noise.

Furthermore, it was not a _good_ paper. It was stylistic vomit.

Overarching themes and loosely grappled facts, un-cited and often unsuitable, formed the loose weave that the rest of the words settled into. The only clarity of the paper was Davey’s vocabulary, that adiaphorous panorama that (apparently) knew neither bounds nor restraint. Lofty, pedantic paragraphs interrupted one another, expansive run-ons and expository fragments littering the pages. His thoughts were jumbled, manic, and failed to make any cohesive argument. There was no thesis and, though a reference page was present this time around, it was peppered with incomplete information and Wikipedia pages. His topic had shifted from a respectable but creative rhetoric evaluation of key battles in French history to a savage mash-up of human emotion and beauty and music. It would have been eclectic for a personal journal entry; it was poorly researched for a high school editorial. It waxed poetic about emotions and jumped abruptly into an impossibly literal description of symphony mechanics that he suspected were copied directly from a book or website.

It was when Adam reached the phrase “pulchritudinous sonority of sonance” that he realized definitively that there was no stretch of criteria, no reach of mercy and nay, no act of _God_ that could justify a passing grade on the disjointed, delusionary swill before him. He had never read such arrogant, intelligent idiocy in all his time as a professor, including the years he’d spent at a community college.

With a trembling hand, he scratched a bold F onto the last page of Marchand’s break from reality. He tried to remember if Davey had left him with a rough draft of his other paper, the one that read like an intelligent argument and not a manic episode, if he could grade and return that instead—but no. No, Adam had made every effort to help. Marchand had done this to himself. He had, essentially, dug his own grave, even though Adam had done his damnedest to eliminate all the shovels.

Jade was going to kill him.  


End Notes:

So, yeah. Sex. Tell me what you think, please, I've got anxiety! Also, how'd you like that Jade section that was written entirely in future conditional? Because I had a lot of fun with that, I thought it was really cool. It kind of built up its own rhythm and swept me away. A lot of my writing process is the words running ahead and me trying desperately to follow.

I'm doing overnights this week at work, so I'm a little out of it, falling behind on my strict writing schedule, and also procrastinating heavily. I will do my best to get next chapter up sometime next week; thank you all for reading!

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	5. Chai Tea Latte

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! It's Wednesday, and that doesn't just mean new comic books--it means new fic! (Wednesday is my self-imposed deadline. If I can't write a chapter in between Wednesdays I should be ashamed of myself.) I don't own the members of AFI, and none of this happened. Additionally, the only thing I earn from this is your wonderful reviews--which I demand more of, incidentally, because you're all so wonderful and helpful that I suffer withdrawal, sometimes.
> 
> Another thing I don't own is Wikipedia.
> 
> Read on!

This time, Davey didn’t bother looking at the grade. When he got an assignment back, standard procedure dictated that he flip through the pages with urgency, scanning teacher comments and scrutinizing what they referred to, catching typos and berating himself, feeling smug and congratulatory when his eyes lit upon the letter grade—or, rarely, feeling affronted and outraged by the low marks he knew he didn’t deserve.

When Prof. Carson dropped his midterm on his fold-out desk and strode on, not even glancing at him, Davey crushed the paper in his hand and stuffed it into the bottom of his bag, not looking. He had no desire to tear himself open and look his plummeting GPA in the eye. He knew that whatever was penned on his paper wasn’t something he could bear to read. He doubted if Prof. Carson had left any comments at all in the margins. He could imagine the man’s initial confusion, searching through foreign content for the thesis he’d given up three hours of his Saturday to refine and support, looking for citations and page numbers from the obscure books he’d pulled off his own wobbling shelves and pressed into Davey’s hands with utmost tenderness. And then he could imagine the man’s disappointment as the paper revealed itself, in an achingly slow crawl, to be something else entirely. No—there wouldn’t be anything in the margins. Or at least, not after the first page, not after the introduction blazed by without mention of the thesis they hammered out together, or really any thesis at all. There would only be the letter, penned in red, on the last page, lower right corner.

Davey didn’t even want to think about this letter. Less still did he want to reread his own letters, so stringent and passionate and assuming, so overblown and transparent and rickety. Something wet shuddered in his belly as he considered Jade reading it. Jade telling Adam in a lover’s low whisper that Davey hand-delivered it to him. The rumbling laughter they’d share, fingers slipping over hip bones and twining through coarse hair, at his expense, at his expense, at his expense. They’d call it the Munchausen paper: pages penned by a pathetic little Pinocchio boy, trying desperate to be real, dressed to impress and false inside, an arrogance unbecoming. It would be a joke, to them—he’d be a joke to them. They’d snicker over his proud pages together in the warm halo of their home.

And wasn’t even his reaction aggrandized, vainglorious? Wasn’t even the reflexive sourness of his gut, the squirm, the pang, contrived? Davey didn’t feel real, couldn’t imagine that just days ago that drunk, dizzy creature had been himself. The two were on opposite sides of the mirror; they were unrecognizable to one another, and yet. Something stirred beneath his skin and Davey shuddered, pushing the paper down deeper, crunching it under his heavy textbooks and trying to lose it among the crumbs and pen caps, the gum wrappers and paper scraps. It wasn’t a paper; it was a shipwreck. Send it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and it would haunt him. He would never be rid of it.

Davey’s ears still thrummed with doom 45 minutes later as he slouched beneath the weight of his suddenly anchor-like messenger bag, staggering down the stadium steps of the lecture hall with his Sisyphean burden. Prof. Carson, erasing the timeline he’d scrawled across the whiteboard in the course of his lecture, did not turn. It came as a relief, that there was no invitation, no concerned ‘we should talk’, none of the song-and-dance charade of professor concerned with student’s grade, because that wasn’t what any of them cared about. It was all class statistics and salary and tenure with them, no matter how many hours of their Saturday they spent on your midterm. It was a show. Really, underneath it all, Prof. Carson went home to Jade each night, and didn’t give a fuck about Davey or the rest of them. In his place, Davey wouldn’t either.

Filled by his own thoughts, Davey barely saw him. And when at the last second the image of Jade Puget leaning against a stone breakwall just outside the Armoury flashed against his cornea, he did what any man in his position would do: he spun on his heel, mouth gawping open, and stared, sputtering, face filling up with blood.

Jade gave a little wave and Davey’s heart stopped beating. “Hi,” he croaked, mouth like a desert, sand on his lips. _Ohgodohgodohgodohgod_. Cognizant sentences refused to form inside his pulsing head. ‘Hi’ had just about extended his mental capacity to its limit.

Jade smiled in a way that would have sent chills throughout his body, had he not been frozen with dread. Jade had read his midterm. Jade was here to tell him that his midterm had sucked. Jade was here to tell him—  
Sense, hurried along by terror, returned to Davey. Jade wasn’t here to tell _him_ anything. Jade was here to see Prof. Carson. The assumptions inside his own brain were laughable, Davey chided himself. Still, his racing heart did not slow. “Professor Carson’s still in the lecture hall,” Davey squeaked out, feeling faint.

“Good,” Jade murmured, and this time Davey did get chills. The older man pushed off the breakwall and strode towards him with a kind of measured grace, a physical competence, of a much younger man. Davey felt all the crucial things inside of him melt into slush. Good-bye, chest cavity. Good-bye, diaphragm. Good-bye, lungs. He was dizzy.

“I was hoping to catch you,” Jade went on, voice conversational for all that his amber eyes bore into Davey with an intensity nearing pain. “I read your paper—more than once.” Davey flinched at the words. Here it came: the dressing-down, the bashing, the attack of truth. “It was exquisite,” Jade said softly, carefully, as if the words would break if anyone overheard. “It made me feel as I haven’t in years.”

There was something in his eyes, then; something vulnerable to Davey’s gaze. A question, maybe; but Davey didn’t know how to answer it, and while he hesitated, it was cobbled over with false cheer. “Anyhow,” Jade blustered on amicably, “I didn’t know how else to get in touch with you, so.”

It was a weak finish, wavering, and Davey understood that once again, his paper was only a pretense. Jade had come here, looking for him, for a greater reason. Jade reached out, quick as a snake, and caught Davey’s wrist in his hand. He looked as surprised to have done it as Davey was that he had, but he didn’t let go. He looked hard into Davey’s eyes and said decisively, “I’d love to discuss it with you further. Maybe over coffee?”

It was all Davey could do to rock his head on his neck—lift his chin up, then back down again. A nod. He opened his mouth, meaning to say ‘yes’, but nothing came out. So he nodded helplessly, skull teetering on his white-skinned neck, and Jade graced him with a beneficent smile. “Great,” Jade said encouragingly, dropping his wrist. The moment their contact was broken Davey felt a sharp jolt knife through his body, but at least he could breathe again. He staggered along like a drunk in Jade’s wake, the older man bouncing happily in his steps as he led the way across campus.

 

 

There was a tea shop not far from the campus library that Jade had patronized frequently in their first year at Amherst College. Not so long ago, but it felt a lifetime away. He’d liked it there, quiet and dusty with antique armoires stacked with mugs and herbs, short wobbling bookcases flanking the armchairs and loveseats and doubling as end tables, small round café tables set up in the great Victorian windows, nestled in musty velvet curtains. Jade had drank tea and jotted spindly notes onto his small music pad and fiddled with the tiny golden handles on the windows when he’d run out of things to write. Abruptly, he had stopped coming out to the tea shop. He could no longer remember why—only that, little by little, and then all at once, he had stopped leaving the house altogether, had resented even the trip across the street to the Burgans’, had begun to fear any moment out of his dank web, strung with grisly bits of devoured flesh and bone, no longer recognizable as either Adam or himself.

He did not take Davey to this tea shop. For one thing, it was an intimate place, lit by rosy candles and flickering wall sconces, smelling of old books and given to whispering conversations. For another, he was worried that the owners would recognize him, would inquire as to his two-year absence. Perhaps there was a mystery, a romance, to being a shut-in, a recluse; but Jade still didn’t feel the need to share his peculiar, pallid habits with his quarry. It might spook him.

Quarry—Jade realized he’d thought it and looked closer. Was that what Davey was? Was he a hunt, a chase, a prize? Was he truly something Jade was seeking? The last, at least, he was able to answer. Yes. He certainly seemed to be actively questing for Davey’s affections. Why else had he shown up outside of Adam’s building as classes ended? Why else had he blurted out an ill-advised invitation? All that remained to be seen was whether he intended to make a plea for friendship or pursue this star-crossed seduction.

As irritated with himself as he was scintillated by Davey’s footsteps behind him, Jade led them not to his tea shop but to one of three campus Starbucks. A mass-produced, overpriced cup of uncomplicated coffee suited his purposes better than a revealing, chipped china mug of tea.

If Davey was disappointed by their commercial destination, he did not show it. In fact, he didn’t speak at all until he stepped up and ordered a chai latte. Jade did not offer to buy the boy’s coffee, though at least half of him wanted to insist upon it. He was trying not to confuse himself. He was trying not to be vulnerable. He was trying not to end up in prison.

Although—and this would have been a pertinent question to ask much, much earlier—how old _was_ the boy? Statutory age, or older? Jade laughed softly at his own thoughts. How presumptuous of him. Just because Davey’s paper had come like the voice of his own soul, reaching out its hand, it hardly meant that Davey felt it too. It hardly meant there was any connection between them, save for an old man and his lust.

Maybe, Jade reflected, he was having a midlife crisis. But if that was what this was, he’d have to think of a new explanation for the last ten years of stagnation and futility, and he didn’t feel up to that this afternoon.  
Davey selected a table that put them not only next to a window, but also facing one another. Jade balked a little at this choice—anyone walking by would see—but swallowed his protestation. Let them see. It wasn’t as if he was hiding anything—as if he was doing anything wrong. Right?

Jade cupped his hands around his steaming drink gratefully. He was a man of physical agitation; had he not had something to occupy his hands, the drilling of his fingers into the table and the fiddling with everything on its surface would surely have given him away, would have shown Davey whatever it was he was hiding.

Seated at last, Jade found himself in the uncomfortable position of needing to furnish the conversation that he had lured Davey here with. It wouldn’t be difficult—he really had loved the paper—but he’d already established himself as the kind of man who asked strangers to sing to him and then waited outside their classes hoping they’d emerge. If he waxed effusive, it would be too much, wouldn’t it? It would be Davey screaming for campus security, and a restraining order, and Adam’s loss of yet another job. And while the latter was surely a foregone conclusion, given Adam’s track record, Jade hardly wanted to hurry it along. Certainly not when he was finally writing. Certainly not when he’d found a muse.

“You make me hear music again,” slipped out onto the table between them, leaving Jade’s lips contorted in horror, having said exactly what he’d been trying not to. He waited for the hammer to fall, for Davey to leap back from him in disgust or at least change the subject nervously, but instead the young man looked up through dark lashes and smiled shyly, blushing.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” Jade backtracked, adding a smile for warmth, hoping that Davey would take him as an eccentric artist—and weren’t composers given a certain license towards eccentricity?—and not a horny old bastard. “What I meant to say is that, well, the passion in your writing is inspiring. It reminds me of me, when I was your age. It’s very exciting to an old man like me, watching young talent flourish.”

Davey was blushing in earnest now, sipping his chai and staring at the steam curling out of his cardboard cup. “I—I’m not that good,” he said, speaking at last. “I mean, I like to write, but it’s not something I could make a living off of.”

“From where I sit, Davey,” Jade said carefully, so carefully, trying to sound as harmless as a lamb, “you can do anything. Anyway, you wouldn’t be here at Amherst if you weren’t talented enough to succeed in your field.”

Pleasure once again crossed Davey’s face. His voice was squeakier as he said, “I don’t mean to disappoint you, Mr. Puget, but I’m applying for the nursing program here. I want to help people.”

Jade was affronted by this, outraged, and he let it show on his face. Helping people—! _Art_ helped people. Poetry and music and paintings and theater _helped_ people. Nurses—what the fuck did nurses do? Gave sponge baths to old people, stuck needles in children, performed those rudimentary tasks which kept the fleshy shell alive so long after all that mattered had died out. It was art that nourished, art that sustained, art that helped and healed and grew that part of a man that truly counted, that truly made him a man! And surely Davey knew that. Surely Davey had written those very words! Before him, Davey winced, expecting a blow.

“That’s very noble of you,” Jade said at last, feeling a little helpless, so powerless to make Davey see how he had helped him, what he was capable of, what the human spirit could accomplish unhindered by the physical form. “But if I may—why did you choose nursing?”

This question was clearly one Davey was more comfortable with. “Oh, well, I’ve always been good with people. I like to be around them, and I like to talk to them, and I like the idea of helping them. Kind of… making the resources I take up worthwhile, if that makes sense. I figure that if I can help just one person, that makes up for me, you know? And then there’s social responsibility, right? As a part of civilization, it would be selfish not to touch the lives of the people around me. And, like I said, it’s not like I could live off writing.”

When Davey’s confident stream of chatter died, Jade said dryly, “I manage it.” It wasn’t strictly true—without Adam’s paltry salary, he would have been finished a decade ago, working crabbed retail hours and tonguing the curvature of a .45 in his free time. But that wasn’t something you said to a talented young man, one who was aspiring—and Jade could see it there, a reluctance, a spark—to be an artist himself.

Davey had the grace to look embarrassed. “I didn’t mean—!” he sputtered. “I mean, of course, art can be very lucrative, but it takes a lot of talent, like what you have.”

Feeling prophetic, feeling savage, Jade met Davey’s bashful, burnished eyes and did not hesitate to let show the blaze within himself. “ _You_ have what I have,” he said forcefully, meaningfully, and it was too much. Davey looked startled, taken aback, flattery chased by fear chased by something that moved too quickly for Jade to place. Trying to take it back, Jade frowned at his rashness and amended, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I hardly know your situation.”

“No, please,” Davey protested, sounding rather weak. “I just… I’m just…. Wow, is all. Do you… do you really think that…?”

“Absolutely I do,” Jade said with a brisk nod. Seeing a glimmer of wetness in Davey’s eyes, he made a prudent subject change. “So, what you wrote about Antoine de Lhoyer and the impact of royalism on his work was very interesting to me. Perhaps you could expand…?”

Inexplicably, Davey’s face only deepened its claret. “Oh god,” he moaned softly, into his chai. “I… um… this is embarrassing, but… I got that off of Wikipedia.”

“Excuse me?” Jade asked, more sharply than he’d intended.

“I, uh, yeah,” Davey mumbled miserably, knotting his hands together around his cup. “I’ve never even heard any of his pieces. I kind of… wrote that to impress you.”

Jade should have been scandalized, he knew that. Flattery was an incorrect, irrational response to the situation. And yet, he did not feel duped, or angry, or anything of the sort. Instead, he was touched by Davey’s youth, his bumbling honesty, and moreover the length he’d gone to to make an impression on Jade. Not that Wikipedia was such a great length, of course; but the gesture was. And certainly the boy had been sincere enough in his first paper, the one that had caught Adam’s eye; and surely the little-known works of de Lhoyer were a small fabrication in a body of soaring, insightful work. In other words, a forgivable offense. (And if he would not have forgiven it in anyone else, well, perhaps he was growing softer in his advancing years; maybe he was learning kindness; maybe he was humoring a young man whose voice had crawled inside him and would not leave; and maybe it was chemical, maybe it was the blindness of lust, of love, of madness, and maybe, maybe he didn’t care what it was, or why it was, as long as _it was_.)

So instead of letting his reaction take its natural course—its Jade-course—he gave in to another inclination entirely. “That,” he said, punctuating the proclamation with a sip of his house brew, “is a tragedy. de Lhoyer’s work is some of the most beautiful extant music in this world. In fact—I have a recording of _Duos Nocturnes_ at home. If you’d like to hear it…” Jade trailed off, not wanting to push.

“I’d love to,” Davey said, a little breathless. But then, just when he had what he thought he’d wanted stepping into his hand, unsuspecting and fresh and so devastatingly pure, a coldness spread through his belly, extinguishing—or perhaps only tempering—the inferno within.

“Wonderful,” Jade said, voice clipped, with a sharp nod, heavy with inexplicable dread. “But I’ll have to lend it to you some other time. I’ve an appointment to get to.” He emphasized this with a glance at his watch, just a moment too late to be convincing. But Davey’s face had fallen, just a little, and he nodded with false eagerness.

“Oh, yeah, definitely. I’ve got a class anyway,” the young man said, getting to his feet abruptly and throwing his bag aggressively onto his shoulder. “Thanks for, um, doing this for me. I appreciate it.” With those words, and not so much as a backward glance, he hurried for the door. Jade watched him go, trying to suppress the admiration and desire pooling in him anew, and Davey’s twice-sipped chai steamed on the table, casting an afterimage of the man’s beauty in its swirled plumes.

 

 

“Here.” The word was paired with a weighty thud, and Adam looked up to see a dusty green bottle of rippling red wine looking quite at home on his wooden faculty desk. Following the bottle further, up its tapered, maroon-sheathed neck, he found a hand; following the hand, soft and hairy at the knuckles, he found the arm, torso, and then person of Hunter Burgan.

“Ah, yes, that will go nicely in my collection of non sequiturs,” Adam greeted his department head, getting to his feet to exchange a quick handshake before sinking back into his desk chair. It was late, late enough that he ought to be at home; the weak winter sun had failed already, and the acceptable hours for eating dinner and having a family life were rapidly depleting. He couldn’t quite face Jade tonight, though. For one thing, he was fifty years old now, and frankly Jade had been insatiable lately; as much as it pained him to admit it, Adam’s physiology simply wasn’t up to the task of performing at its sexual peak, having passed that point a quarter century ago. Besides that, the flowers had confused him. The screaming and the yelling and the broken glass, well, that had been the Aughts all over again: flowers, though, were something new. Apology flowers were, in fact, a page taken out of Adam’s own handbook; for Jade, any hint of affection, physical or otherwise, had always served well enough as amends. He didn’t know how to cope, having his own tactics used against him. As much as he’d like to believe it, Adam couldn’t quite accept that the flowers had simply been a kind, peace-making gesture. It went deeper than that. There was a symbol or a metaphor or at the very least a harbinger enclosed in _that_ particular message, stuffed somewhere in between the surprise office visit, surprise office sex, and surprise apology flowers. That was another thing—Jade, his Jade, had never cared for surprises. He found them to be superficial and fleeting and had chided Adam more than once for engaging in whimsical, romantic behavior.

Then, of course, the most mitigating of all factors: the Marchand kid’s paper. Jade had wanted a copy of it, and Adam hadn’t had the heart to give him one. He’d graded it, lowly indeed, and handed it back to Davey without even mentioning it. Thus far, Jade hadn’t brought it up either, but it was unlikely he’d forgotten. If anything, he’d registered Adam’s suspicious silence on the matter and already assumed the worst. That meant that at any moment, a storm could gather from sunny skies, and he’d be in the middle of an open field cowering beneath his umbrella, seconds away from lightning fricassee.

The point was, you couldn’t really prepare for Jade, or whatever fresh hell Jade might have in store. Not with so many things still up in the air. Whether he expected sex, or romance, or a full-fledged war tonight, Adam didn’t have it in him to deliver. He felt like he hadn’t slept in six years.

Still, for Burgan, there was a smile on his face, niceties on his lips. For his part, the man smiled indulgently. “A quintessential piece, I’m sure,” he said, “but this, friend, is your retirement gift for Kittingshire. This is a 2005 Charles Wetmore cabernet sauvignon, a Wente Vineyard reserve, and as a connoisseur and doddering old fool, the man is going to be absolutely delighted.”

Adam didn’t quite know what to say. Their professional relationship had reached an alarmingly tender, domestic level if Burgan was now doing his shopping for him. He was flattered that Burgan had thought of him—beyond flattered, really, that upon hearing that the chairman of the College of Arts and Sciences was retiring, the man had next thought of what Adam ought to give him as a parting gift—but what could he say? A mere ‘thank you’ hardly seemed sufficient, but a full-out declaration of love hardly seemed appropriate for the workplace. What he settled for was, “I don’t know much about wine, but I’m almost certain I can’t possibly accept this.”

Burgan dropped himself into one of the leather chairs facing Adam’s desk, grin splitting his face in two. “Nonsense. It was given to me years ago, and I’m not a collector myself.”

“Let me write you a check for it, then,” Adam pressed, bordering on the point of rudeness. Could he afford an expensive bottle of wine? If he wrote a check, would it even go through? It was bad form to foist money upon someone trying to do you a kindness, he knew, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Seeing the look on the old bastard’s face when you give it to him will be enough,” Burgan said firmly, sparkle in his eyes. “He’ll spend the evening raving about your thoughtfulness, and go on to pressure his replacement and the whole of the board in your favor. You’d be a fool to resist,” he added with a smile, seeing the doubt on Adam’s face.

What Adam was thinking was, Jade would never do something like this. Jade would never accept someone’s help like this. Jade would call this charity, and spit in Burgan’s eye, and give Kittingshire nothing. Jade would rant and rave about how his talent and skill would get him tenure if the university knew anything, and if his genius wasn’t sufficient to secure his job, Amherst wasn’t an institution he wanted to be associated with that anyway. And maybe it was that, hearing Jade’s self-righteous tirade in his head already, that put him off the refusal that what little pride remained called for.

“I am forever in your debt,” he said grandly, instead, accepting the gesture and the wine in one. “I’ll send it over to Kittingshire’s office directly.”

Burgan raised his eyebrows, looking amused. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather give it to him yourself at the party this Friday?”

Again, Adam found himself somewhat speechless, uncertain of what social protocol demanded. Of course he knew that Kittingshire’s retirement party loomed ahead, but this was only his third year at Amherst and he’d spoken to Kittingshire only once; he was hardly important enough to garner invitation. It was a black tie affair, an elegant dinner party staged in one of the grander halls of the college; it was the last faculty social events until the Christmas party. Adam wasn’t upset by his failure to warrant invitation, though; it would be a long, stuffy night of listening to Kittingshire and other board members drone on, and the chicken in white asparagus sauce would almost certainly be dry, and worst of all would be that, had Adam been invited, Jade would have been there, an anchor at his side, grumbling and griping and keeping him from mingling with any of his colleagues or bosses or the influential board members, looking beautiful in a suit and turning away from Adam when they at last got home.

It was ugly to have thought it, and Adam was immediately sorry that he had. That wasn’t fair to Jade. Jade was—well. If one thing was apparent these days, it was that Jade was trying, wasn’t he? It was the only explanation Adam could come up with. Tired as he was, he couldn’t hate Jade, couldn’t think anything too cruel. Because, all else aside, Jade was trying.

Seemed like he’d been thinking that a lot, lately. _Trying_. What was trying but another word for not quite there—not quite good enough? But Burgan was still waiting for an answer. It wasn’t the time.

“I’m not popular enough to make the guest list,” Adam said, hoping it was a delicate way to put it.

“I’m inviting you, Carson,” Burgan said, breaking down and spelling it out for him at last. “It’d be a good career move to accept.”

“Then I accept,” Adam said, smile cracking his dry lips. He found himself caught between a rock and a hard place—that is, between tenure and the prospect of forcing Jade into a suit and a smile. And for once, he didn’t hesitate. _Tenure_ , he thought. _Just this once, I’m choosing tenure._ What he really meant was, _just this once I’m choosing me_.

 

 

The truth was, Davey _had_ had a lecture—not to go to, per se, but to be at, pretty much from the moment Jade asked him if he’d like to discuss his debacle of a midterm over coffee. (And that was another thing—when he’d finished it, when all was said and done, he’d felt so wonderfully spent, so magnificently _complete_ , that he’d been like a different person: happy and whole and assured of his direction. And now, even in the light of Jade’s praise, he found himself humbled, ashamed, of the piece that had so recently left his harried hand. Was that what writing was? Frenzy, elation, and then at last, embarrassment? That was like chasing a bitter drink with gasoline, and Jade’s gaze like lighting a match. He was torn and ignited and—and none of it mattered. Not when he remembered the wonderful way he’d felt upon finishing. And he wondered if it would always be like that, every time he finished a piece—wondered if shame would always follow. He didn’t think so, but—that was another thing he’d have to ask Jade.)

The lecture had been organic chem. While it was regrettable to have missed it, Davey assured himself, it wasn’t as if attending would have done him much good. His relationship with organic chemistry was reminiscent of Shakespeare. (That is to say: a goddamn tragedy.) Anyway, sitting in Starbucks with Jade had erased all thoughts of his GPA or even the nursing program from his brain. It had been a struggle to correct the composer’s assumption that Davey, too, was an artist. The whole thing seemed unreal to him now, just hours later. Had Jade Puget really likened Davey’s skill to his own? Had he really admitted to taking random factoids off Wikipedia to _impress_ the man? The haze over their conversation made it surreal, difficult to pin down with remembrance. Had either of them really said any of those things? Davey wasn’t certain, anymore.

Still, the giddy heights his stomach tripped along remained. His hands still trembled with his exhilaration and his lowest muscles still felt clenched, as if to burst. And he most definitely had not made it to organic chem that afternoon. So certainly some of it had been real.

These thoughts swirling effervescent through him, Davey flipped through his mail and trudged up the stairs to his dorm in a daze. There was an envelope from the university advising offices, the paper a thin, urgent yellow; SCHOLARSHIP INFORMATION ENCLOSED was stamped on the outside. Davey didn’t think much of it, discarding the other envelopes on his desk and tearing this one open with a fingernail, until the paper was unfolded in his hands. It was difficult to focus on the words; only the phrase ‘academic probation’ was clear.

He didn’t need to read the fine print to know what it meant. It meant that his grades weren’t just slipping; they were in a landslide. It was free fall. He had a semester to bring them back up or he’d lose his scholarship. It also meant that he could almost certainly kiss the nursing program goodbye.

For the first time in weeks, he felt like he was living in real time again, awake and breathing and fully conscious. He rifled a little savagely through the pile of mail, coming upon an envelope full of midterm grades. He knew he should open it, look at the damage and the state of his GPA, but he didn’t have it in him. Hands shaking for a whole new set of reasons, feeling sick, he began to tear at the envelope. One crisp rip straight down the middle. A longer one, breaking the halves into halves themselves. Smaller and smaller he tore the pieces, breathing a little easier with each reduction in size. Soon, he told himself, they’d be so small they’d disappear. Soon they’d be so small they couldn’t hurt him. Soon they’d been so small they wouldn’t be real at all.

Like me, thought Davey. Just like me.

End Notes:

I really love Adam's line about non sequiturs. I think it's hilarious. Thank you for reading and please, let me know what you think! Any and all suggestion is welcomed.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	6. Trials

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Wednesday, and I'm right on time! I don't own the boys and the this never happened, but damn did I have a lot of fun writing this chapter. Let me know if you like it too; it kind of swept me away, and while it's a bit lengthy, I think the building intensity will sweep you away too, given half a chance.
> 
> This one is very sex-centric again. Also, at one point in here, sex kind of gets dragged through gore, and I think it turned out just lovely.

Say one thing for flirting with disaster, say the act made Jade write like his pen was molten steel. Last week’s abortive coffee date with Davey cemented two things: the adagio was put to bed for once and for all (and, Jade felt, he had a foot in the door with the scherzo), and Jade’s conviction that he had to see the boy again. For the first time in years, Jade put down his pen without fear of never picking it up again; for the first time in years, he had utter confidence that he could stop writing now, and start again later in the day, the week, the month—whenever he chose to.

With his success, his confidence, came conviction. Not just that Davey had, somehow, become an integral part of the symphony, and therefore his life; also that what he’d been writing, what he was still humming now to himself, was _good_. It was something people would want to hear, something musicians would tremble, exhilarated, to play, something that would stir joy and despair and every other thing Jaded had felt writing it in the listeners. It was time, Jade decided, to do that which he had not dared attempt in years.

It was time to call his producer.

For all that his office was a living, breathing, terrifying organism of heaving chaos, he knew exactly where Jerry’s number was. He forced a groaning, overstuffed desk drawer open and dug carelessly through the melee of paper and discarded pencils within, tossing great handfuls of scrap onto the already ankle-deep heap that was the floor. He didn’t stop until he could glimpse the pale wood of the drawer’s bottom; he groped around under the mess blindly, keeping his fingertips close to the splintery wood, until their pads caught on a business card. He prised it up tenderly, dried and yellowed tape crackling easily away from the edges. Jade pulled his quarry into the light, a creased and age-bleached card, embossed with the name Jerry Finn, a Los Angeles street address, and 10 long-neglected digits.

He jerked his phone out of his tight jean pocket and, before he could think better of it or hesitate, he dialed.

“You’ve reached the offices of Jerry Finn; this is Veronica speaking.” The receptionist’s canned greeting was a relief; Jade should have stayed in touch with Jerry, kept his contact info current. But Jade hadn’t thought he’d ever need the number again, had he? And Jerry hadn’t exactly been pleased with him. For all that, though, he’d still taken the care to tape the card to the bottom of a drawer, make sure he wouldn’t lose it, and somehow kept the hiding place secure in his dwindling memory all this time.

The number had remained the same, but it seemed a lot else had changed. For one thing, the receptionist was new. And had she said office _s_? Moving on up in the world, Jerry was. It had been a long time since he’d been pressing recordings of Jade’s symphonies and booking orchestras and venues. That didn’t necessarily change anything, Jade told himself, soothing raveled anxieties down into a knot that was, if still tangled, respectable.  
“Hello,” Jade said, disconcertment making him cautious and formal. “Is Jerry in?”

Receptionist Barbie made a little annoyed humming noise. “And who may I say is calling?”

Jade felt ideally positioned to reciprocate her annoyance, but did his best to keep his voice politely frosty. “Jade Puget. I’m a client.”

He heard the clacking of keys and then Barbie hummed again. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any Pugets listed in the client database. If you’d like to leave a message, I can pass it along to Mr. Finn.”

Suddenly he wasn’t Jerry anymore; he was Mr. Finn. This meant, Jade gathered, that his identity was suspect. Did so many hopefuls and delusionals flood ‘Mr. Finn’s’ office with phone calls that a screening process was necessary? Jade found himself grinding his teeth. He hadn’t been the most successful of Jerry’s clients, even at the time, but surely the front desk Mattel dolls should know his name. At the very least, it should ping in the database, but there it was: nothing. He’d been written off entirely.

Jade’s confidence wavered, and so he let indignation take its place. “I’m sorry—Veronica, was it?—but I’m pressed for time, and Jerry’s expecting my call. Just put me through, would you?” It was a last-ditch attempt, and he hoped the self-importance in his tone would persuade her where his credentials apparently failed to. Anyway, it wasn’t strictly untrue; after what had happened upon their last meeting, he was sure Jerry _had_ been expecting his call, however many years ago it had been.

Barbie’s voice came back clipped and arctic. “Mr. Finn is out of the office right now. I’ll tell him you called,” she said stiffly, and before Jade had time to protest, the line went dead.

“Shit, shit, SHIT!” he found himself yelling, kicking at his file cabinet in real anger. How _dare_ she hang up on him! How _dare_ she not have any idea who he was! How dare stupid goddamn Jerry leave him out of the stupid goddamn database! How dare the world forget his name—how dare the world never know it at all.

Anger washed over Jade, steeping in his bones—anger and worthlessness and indignation. How could he feel so mind-numbingly _helpless_? He was 52 years old. He had been alive for a long, long time. And in all his life, what had he ever accomplished? What had he done but wince and whine and fail to write? The anger took a new course now; self-loathing curdled in his gut.

“No,” he heard himself whisper, and took it upon himself to say it more loudly, with a stronger voice. “No,” he repeated, and this time he didn’t sound like a frightened child; this time he sounded like a man old enough to mean it, to know what he was saying no to. So what if the—god—almost 19,000 days before this one had all been wasted? So what if he had accomplished nothing until now, so long as now he was writing. So long as now, at last, he was accomplishing things.

Jade breathed deeply, feeling better, feeling strong and confident and as if he’d never wavered. There. If Jerry’s receptionist wanted to hang up on him, that was her prerogative. It was probably even a job requirement: hang up on loonies who claim to be clients but aren’t in the database. Jade could respect a woman for doing her job, couldn’t he? Of course. It wasn’t personal. He wasn’t a child; he didn’t have to take it personally. He’d just have to wait for Jerry to call him. That wouldn’t be so hard. That wouldn’t be so hard because, again, he was not a child. He was 52 years old. He could wait for a phone call.

Jade sat down to write, but found himself too agitated, knees jiggling, hands curling the corners of the page whenever he relaxed control. He kept removing the pen cap from between his teeth, unaware of putting it there. Okay. So. Sitting still wasn’t working. That was fine. He could clean instead. There were dishes to wash, carpets that hadn’t been vacuumed in god knows how long. But household chores sounded too awful to even consider. No, that wouldn’t work; okay. He knew what he needed. He’d go outside, breathe the air, and rake the leaves. He’d always liked to rake leaves. It was good, honest, productive work, and even with the moldy underpinnings dead leaves had a beautiful smell. Life and death and decomposition: it was the smell the East Coast had been founded on.

Feeling better now that he had a direction, a _purpose_ , something to do that was in every way independent from Jerry Finn and that goddamn Barbie, Jade plastered a smile to his face, pulled a sweater on over his t-shirt, and marched outside to rake.

 

 

 

Adam stood in line at the pharmacy, feeling his face filling with blood and heat. The term ‘embarrassment’ did not, he felt, even begin to encompass what he was experiencing. This was like the first time he’d ever bought lube: the sheer overwhelming quantity of it in the aisle, the little bottles boasting a thousand different unique properties; being too embarrassed to study them too closely, to even stand too close to the lube side of the aisle, instead hanging back so far he was almost pressed flush against the opposing tampon display; grabbing a bottle in a panic when someone else stepped into the aisle, face flaming, wondering why in hell someone would want to experience ‘the dizzying tingle of fire and ice’ and in what way ice would be conducive to an erection; the way the checkout girl had smirked at him. _Please just think it’s for masturbating_ , he remembered thinking. _Please don’t think it’s for sex with boys._

The memory was enough to curl his lips with a smile, easing the present embarrassment with the more ridiculous one of his youth. A few days earlier, he’d been grateful to take care of the hard part of this situation over the phone, thinking that nothing could have been more humiliating than looking a general practitioner in the eye and explaining his problem. He saw now his mistake: his GP would have given him a handful of free samples if he’d come into the office, instead of sending a prescription over to the nearest Walgreens to be filled. Adam never would be in his current predicament of Walgreens shame if he’d just manned up and looked his doctor in the eye when he said the words.

Maybe, though, it was better that he suffered, he mused, eyeing the seemingly endless line of fidgety college girls picking up their birth control and morning-after pills in front of him. He didn’t think he recognized any of them, which was a goddamn blessing, but someone he _did_ know, student or staff, could get in line behind him at any moment. What he was doing right now, it was a trial. And what better way to prove his love? What better way to affirm to himself and anyone watching that he, Adam Alexander Carson, was giving it his all—was still and would not stop trying?

The barest notion that he might have stopped trying, might have given up on the love and purpose of his life, had terrified Adam. Trying for Jade had been the common thread of his life, the seam that wound all his failures and misadventures together into a cohesive, if rather dingy, whole. If he gave that up now, if he failed at that too, he didn’t know who he would be or what kind of man he’d wake up as. He wouldn’t know what he was living for, anymore, if it wasn’t to try to coax a smile out of Jade every morning, if it wasn’t to try and make Jade happy, if even only for a moment, in the evening. If he stopped fighting, even for a second, to make things work with Jade, then he felt like everything he was, everything he’d ever been, and everything he loved would slip away from him, and no matter how hard he tried then, it would be too late, and he’d never get it back.

And yeah, probably that was dramatic and foolish, but he was an old man. He’d been living for a long time, and this was the way he’d been doing it. So, with tenure so tauntingly near, he’d decided to put his career on cruise control and redouble his efforts at domestic bliss.

Sex had always been a problem for them. In the beginning, of course, it had consumed everything, and they’d never done anything else; they’d been so in love, then. And later, when things had gotten worse, sex had been weaponized, something Jade could hold over him and manipulate him with, and because it was always so very good and because Adam was unable to suppress his desires and grow cold to the touch as Jade was, it always worked. It had become a stressful event, violent and straining, and ended gasping, both of them spent and beaten and sore, trading toothy smiles come morning. And as they’d grown older, more comfortable in their disarray, even Adam’s once voracious sex drive had tapered off; and Jade’s writing grew harder and harder to come by; and failure grew ever more potent as the theme of their days; and intimacy had become limited to kisses on the cheek and Jade turning away, and Adam taking himself in hand in the shower and trying not to make a sound, and coming and shaking and trying not to let Jade hear him cry out, trying not to let Jade hear him cry.

And now, suddenly, Jade had awoken as a human being, as an _animal_ , and it seemed to Adam he starved for everything—music and food and life and sex. More sex than Adam could keep up with; more sex than Adam, aged and out of shape, could provide. But while Jade had no qualms with letting his partner down, it was the one thing Adam couldn’t stand to do.

And that brought him here, standing in line at the pharmacy, waiting to pick up his prescription for Viagra that he didn’t really need. He wasn’t _that_ old; he still woke up hard most mornings, and could muster a minimum of one erection a day. But Jade’s needs of late, chaotic and abstruse as they had been, demanded more than that. And while Adam had kept up for a week or two, after an exceedingly carnal month, he was starting to lag. There had been incidents: more than one occasion of an obtusely flaccid hiccup in Jade’s plans. True, these occasions had all been a second or third go-round, sometimes the fourth or fifth of the day, and a seventeen year old wouldn’t be able to keep pace with Jade these days, but, god, the look on his face—the disappointment, the hint of embarrassment (either on behalf of his own insatiable desire or, worse, on behalf of Adam), the sneer to cover vulnerability, the look that said ‘I figured as much’, the look that said ‘Exactly what I expected from you’. Well, Adam didn’t much care for that face, the one he saw every time he failed Jade, the one that floated Jade just a little further out of his reach each time it happened by.

So here he was. Approaching the counter at last. Trading a name and a credit card for a little white bag with a little white label, one that he was certain all the girls in line behind him were reading. The clerk gave him a surprised little look, and Adam knew he didn’t look old enough for this breed of sexual dysfunction, but what could he do? For the first time in a veritable age, Jade was interested in sex, and sex with Jade had been the highlight of his miserable existence for the last 30 years. He wasn’t going to pass it up anymore than he was going to let Jade’s needs go unmet. He’d been in that horny, frustrated boat before, and he’d been tempted. God, he’d been tempted. Supple, willing bodies. Sexy little smiles. Gay men on buses, in bookstores and sandwich shops, of all ages and colors and shapes, all looking him over, sizing him up, eye-fucking him and introducing themselves. It wasn’t that he was so attractive, Adam knew; it was that he was in decent shape, that he looked steady and able and reliable, with a kind face and kind eyes, like someone you could love. There had also been the sheer force of need he’d exuded in that sexless era of he and Jade, the vibrancy of lust that awoke its twin in any lonely heart that strayed too near.

Of course, that time of his life too had been years ago—he’d been younger, thinner, less beaten, less tired. And he’d resisted all of them, his assorted temptations; he’d never cheated, not once, and while some days that fact in itself was a torment, most days it was a trophy. He’d drawn on his love for Jade, and it had been his strength, and he’d turned away from every offer, vocalized or merely implied.

He didn’t know that he could count on Jade to do the same thing, if he was left unsated. Jade was an artist, a man of passion and demands, and more times than not at least a little bit insane. More than that, Jade wasn’t so very fond of Adam anymore, was he? There was as much hatred and resentment in him now as there was love. So though he loved Jade, though he trusted Jade, Adam felt it was safer to never ask Jade to choose—safer to pop a pill in secret, paint a smile on his face, and fuck Jade’s mercurial brains out.

His blood thundered a little quicker at that thought. Adam took his credit card back from the nosy clerk and stuffed the little white bag of sexual prowess into the depths of his shoulder bag, keeping his head ducked and eyes resolutely averted. He couldn’t get out of that store fast enough.

 

 

 

Because his life was over anyway, Davey decided a bike ride in the freezing November air would either clear his head or give him what would hopefully be terminal pneumonia, and that was as close to a win-win situation he was likely to get on this side of the academic advisory board. He didn’t bother with the proper attire: hoodie and thin knit gloves over t-shirt and jeans replaced the jacket, scarf, and possible hat a sensible person would don before braving the elements.

He was cold, especially with the wind whipping by him as he challenged himself to explode his lungs as he tore up hills, but he didn’t really mind it, and not just because he was as good as dead. Davey had always been a November kind of person. For one thing, his birthday was in November; for another, there was something about the crisp air and dead skeleton trees and the way he could feel his heartbeat in all of his skin that he loved about the month. It was bleak in a different way than months like February were; the skies were darkening, but the sun still shone, and the future held no respite from winter. And that had always been like poetry to Davey—cold and dying and awful, maybe, but how alive he felt by contrast! How writhing and warm his pale life was, just before it was plunged into the frozen abyss! He could almost feel his own heart struggling in his hand.

He squeezed.

Unthinking, he had wound a jagged route up hills and off paths and across campus—far away and thinking of other awful things, his legs and thundering throat had brought him here, to Jade’s street, to the slanted little roadway hugged by misfit houses, no one matched to the other. The peeling painted siding, the faint smell of rotting wood and late autumn decay, crumbling bricks and a cracked walk and a gravel driveway, treacherous to tires—the hand around his heart squeezed with intent to burst and he slowed his bike in front of Jade’s home, hung with a haze of romance, a glow of suspended disbelief, shimmering and hard to see clearly through all the lust.

This was terrible, a small, rational part of Davey knew. Jade would only distract him from the damnation at hand. His life was ending, and this was something he needed to dwell on. Thinking of Jade, riding past Jade’s house, was only going to patch the thing up with temporary scabs, and he’d forget that he’d ever been wounded, and he’d wake from his libertine reverie in a week or two and suddenly discover he was bleeding. Desperate, he tried to remind himself of his peril, roughly shoving all the thoughts he’d like to avoid to the forefront of his tattered mind. He was going to lose his scholarship, and he wasn’t going to get into the nursing program, and he was going to fail out of Amherst, and—

And Jade was in the front yard. Jade was out, in the front yard, in a grey crew neck sweater, with a rake, grimacing at the wet, rotting leaves that were pounded into the tangled grass, black twisted little peels of life, reeking and uncooperative as late-season leaves always were. And Jade was hacking at the earth with his rake, tearing up grass and leaves and mud and making the tangles worse, and his breath steamed the air and his cheeks flushed pink from the cold and he was so frustrated, hair falling into his eyes and back arched, arms bent and strong and sinewy as they thrashed the rake, and just. God.

Without meaning to, Davey had glided to a halt, a soundless stop in front of Jade, Jade’s house, Jade’s sorry black pile of soggy shriveled leaves. Swearing under his breath, Jade tried to scrape some of the grass and mud out of the rake tines with his battered Adidas sneaker, and for a moment Davey believed that if he was silent and still, he could sit and watch forever and Jade would never know.

In the next second he felt juvenile, like a child riding his bike around the block under a parent’s supervising eye, like he was eight years old again, and he wished spasmodically, uncritically, unthinkingly: he wished it was motorcycle, he wished it was a sports car, he wished it was a fucking foaming pegasus he was straddling, he wished it was any kind of anything that would impress Jade, that would make Jade feel inclined to climb up behind him, that would somehow lead to him straddling Jade instead of his stupid prepubescent bicycle.

And it was this moment, Davey aware of his own heavy, strained breathing and the ridicule of what he must look like, scrawny even next to normal-sized people—and there was no mistaking Jade for one of those—and clinging to his handlebars, that Jade chose to look up suddenly, one foot still on the rake.

 

 

 

Driving home, Adam wrestled with his options. Should he tell Jade about the little white bag? He saw potential for great things coming out of that bag—hours in bed, marathon sex, the kind of 8-hour stretches of sex and sleep and tongues and teeth and so, so much skin that they hadn’t enjoyed since their 20s. He imagined them rolling and twisting and heaving for breath, tangling the sheets and defiling each other, fucking thoroughly, with such exquisite care for detail, taking in every inch, every crease and every freckle, every scar; he imagined each of them swallowing a pill, kissing sloppily, and going for hours, pounding into one another until they were sore, until their hides were alive with sensation, until the very feel of breath from Jade’s lips hitting the hot film of sweat on his neck was enough to push him over the edge.

The very thought of it made Adam shudder, body convulsing sharply, and he gripped the wheel hard, steadying himself. It was hard to swallow, and his breath came shallow. His head spun. But that was hardly his only option. He could burn the bag and hide the bottle behind one of his heaviest, dustiest books. He could pop pills when Jade wasn’t looking and come up behind him, wrap his arms around his partner, and hum into his neck, “I want you”, and press the evidence against the curve of his ass, undaunted by age. For all that Jade had grown into an ice bitch, moments of willful passion had often unhinged him; they had spent themselves throughout the course of many unrestrained nights, and while devoid of tenderness, the fingernail scratches scarred alone attested to the quality of this approach.

But then, of course, this was Jade he was dealing with, Adam reminded himself, trying to clear his head of fevered fantasy. Most likely of all was that Jade would see the bag and its contents as a damning portent of old age. Most likely was that Jade would misread the label and think it said ‘defeat’, ‘game over’, ‘I give up’. He’d think Adam was weak. He’d think Adam was old. He’d be disgusted.

No, Adam allowed himself to be convinced: showing Jade the bag and the bottle would be to negate their very necessity. Admitting his exhaustion, his frailty, to Jade would be folly—it would be like telling Jade that Adam no longer burned the way he did. And it was true that Jade almost certainly already thought this, and at the very least suspected; but Adam couldn’t bear to be given up on. He couldn’t bear to be despised. Not by Jade. Not by the one man he’d measured his whole life against. Not by the one person for whom he’d given everything.

Adam tore through the chalky white paper and cracked open the bottle in his hand, orange plastic splintering into his palm, and he didn’t care. He fished a pill out of the mess and swallowed it dry, never noticing the bright cherry bead of his own blood marking its surface.

 

 

 

“It’s this goddamn rake,” Jade said churlishly, glaring at the thing as he disentangled his toe from its tines. “It’s not me, I swear.”

Davey caught just a hint of a smile around the man’s full lips, a tiny tug at the corners, and a look in his eye like he was letting Davey in on a secret. In that moment, more than any other moment, Davey gave himself over to Jade—Davey loved Jade. He was a god, to be sure; but right then, he looked shy and quiet and devious. He looked mortal. Davey felt his blood flutter beneath his skin and felt, nonsensically, like a bird: tiny and fragile, his whole self pulsing with each winged heartbeat. His breath caught in his throat and he returned Jade’s half smile, wanting for no reason to laugh.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Davey pronounced, feeling silly and giddy and strange, and this sentence struck him as whimsical because, of course, he _lived_ in the neighborhood. “And I didn’t plan to come this way, but I did, and here we are.” Honest: another thing he was feeling was honest. Another thing he was feeling was like volunteering unnecessary information, apparently, but his words encouraged Jade’s boyish smile to spread, so that wasn’t such a bad thing.

“I finished the adagio,” Jade volunteered, reciprocating. “Bitch is finally dead. How’s your writing going?”

“I haven’t written much since midterms,” Davey told him. This was not strictly true: he’d written a great deal of feverish journal entries, and a handful of embarrassing, smutty poems. “But I’m trying poetry,” he added, though what he’d written could hardly be classified as such.

Jade’s face lit up from the inside, as a jack-o-lantern might. “Wonderful!” he said forcefully, with real gladness. “You’ll have to read me some. When it’s ready, of course.”

Davey rubbed his hands together, beginning to feel the cold in earnest. Small talk seemed strained, tight within the binding influence of some bigger thing, a convention or a perception that they couldn’t quite shake. He wondered, then, at thinking it— _they_. One coffee date, and he was lumping them as a single entity? Even within his own head, this was dangerous. Not even the unions of their pronouns was without risk.

On the other hand, there was something gliding beneath the surface of their polite conversation, wasn’t there? If Jade wanted to hear Davey’s poetry… Surely that meant something. Surely every word that was said, every minute gesture, was symbolic. He couldn’t shake the sense that this was exactly the case, and monitored his own ticks and gestures carefully for deeper meaning. “Of course,” Davey agreed readily, “though I think I’d rather die than let you see what I’ve got so far.”

Davey’s straightforwardness was rewarded by a surprisingly full, whole-hearted laugh from Jade’s perfect lips. His amber eyes glittered and he leaned on his rake, grinning like a schoolboy. “Would you like to come inside?” he asked, and his whole body gleamed.

 

 

 

Adam shoved the splinters and the pills into what remained of the bag, cursing under his breath and keeping only half an eye on the road. “Goddamn things,” he muttered to himself, sucking at a puncture in his palm. “More trouble than they’re worth.”

But they wouldn’t be, he amended silently. He tried to imagine what would change between them, were he as inexhaustible as Jade. And then: did he really think anything would change? Maybe it would keep Jade’s body next to his a little longer, but did he really think it would last? Things would go back to the way they had been. He’d gone through it often enough to know the signs, to recognize the stages. This was the beginning of the end. The tenuous peace that stretched between them, already punctuated by violence, would not hold for long. What was Adam doing but trying to hold back the tide?

Oceans be damned, Adam thought. If there had ever been a man for the job, it was him.

What never occurred to him—what had never occurred to him once in all those years—was that Jade might ever leave him. That Jade might tire of him entirely and move on to better things, or at least fresher things, things that didn’t know better yet.

That he might be the better for it, if Jade did.

 

 

 

Feeling a bit like a wrinkled old creep waving candy out the back of an unlicensed van, Jade pulled the door closed behind Davey, the movement bringing their bodies so close that he could feel the heat off the young man’s bones. Davey’s teeth chattered, and Jade found himself wanting to be responsible for those chills.

Desperate for a distraction, a prop, Jade led the way to Adam’s dim library. He directed Davey to the sofa and the afghan on it, and slipped a book from the shelf and offered it to the boy. “John Berryman,” he said brusquely, wincing inwardly at his own tone. He was trying so hard to be charming; when was the last time he’d tried to charm anyone? Whatever charm he’d had had been quietly rusting for a lifetime. He hadn’t tried to win someone over since before Davey had breathed his first breath, most likely. “If you’re going to write poetry, you’d better read this.”

Davey stuck one black-sleeved arm out of the afghan and pulled the book into his lap. “Thank you,” he said, and it was hard for Jade to tell if he was just being polite, or if he meant it.

“Should I get you something warm to drink? Tea or hot chocolate or…?” Jade asked, not sure what to do with himself now that he didn’t have a book to hold. Offering hot drinks to cold people was a social convention, wasn’t it? Unless it sounded like he was just looking for something to slip roofies into. “I’m not going to put anything sinister in it, so don’t worry about that,” burst out of him, followed by a weak and unconvincing laugh. _Smooth_.

Davey laughed too, having the decency not to sound frightened. “That’s what you want me to think,” he teased.

Jade bit his lip. This all seemed too easy. Davey was so light-hearted, so happy to be near him—no one was happy to be near him. He was the ultimate buzzkill. People preferred grisly undead puppies to his company. These were facts. Was Davey really that young, that stupid? Weren’t the neon warning signs glaring at full power? Wasn’t there an alarm bell? Jade had always assumed anyone who occupied the same space he did was blasted by some kind of psychic klaxon, that he wore a KEEP AWAY sign tacked to his forehead. And hadn’t he tacked it there himself? The young man on his couch had to be some kind of aberration.

“It’s just that you look cold,” Jade supplemented, but Davey waved away the offer.

“Really, I’m fine,” he said, still wearing the most beautiful smile Jade could ever remember seeing. “Come sit by me,” Davey invited then, with the voice of the devil himself.

 

 

 

Subtlety was not his best bet, and Adam knew it. But sweeping romantic gestures, something he’d always fancied himself rather good at, were equally out of the question. So the tactic that he was deciding on, here and now, was the kind of presumptuous, demanding proposition only Jade had ever been able to get away with. It was a method, Adam knew, of taking ownership—of saying ‘you’re mine, and I want you now, and I’ll have you’. He intended to do what Jade himself had done, that day in October that felt like a lifetime ago: to simply jump Jade at the door, sweep him off his feet with kisses and more urgent demands. This was, by and large, Jade’s sole method of initiating sex—his wordless way of pressing his hips flush to Adam’s, and how unfailingly the hardness there invoked Adam’s own. _Inductive seduction_ , Adam thought with a smile.

Love and pride and lust—these were the things he felt, thinking of Jade, thinking of storming in and _demanding_ Jade, as his right, as his prize, as if he owned the house and every single thing in it, sentient and smoldering or otherwise. Blood rushed to all the wrong—the right?—the wrong places, and it was hard to concentrate on driving when he could see, with his eyes open, Jade on his knees; when he could feel, hands tight to the steering wheel, his own fingers snaking behind ears and into hair and digging in; and he moaned a little, unprovoked erection bound to his leg, thinking of fucking Jade’s wet mouth instead of love or roses or lying beautiful in bed.

This was new territory for Adam Carson. This was a whole new game he was learning to play. This rough war of dominance, this power struggle, had been unfolding for years, he thought, turning onto Sycamore, his street, at last; he’d just never known before that he’d been fighting. He’d never known before that he was letting Jade win.

 

 

 

Trembling and trying not to, Jade sat, as far away from Davey as the small sofa would permit. “You’re sure you don’t want tea?” he asked, and his voice too was shaking. He was overly aware of the way his own skin felt, sliding over his bones, sleeves whispering over his arms and the barest brush of his jeans sending goosebumps up his legs. He couldn’t stop thinking about his breathing, thought maybe he’d forget to if he didn’t concentrate; it was all he could do not to leap across the loveseat and pin Davey to it, and the human part of him knew that it was wrong, but the animal part of him was demanding it so loudly.

He was sitting still and stiff and the distance between he and Davey’s warm young flesh was achingly, breakingly, vast, and he was trying so hard not to tempt himself, but fuck it, he was tempted; and Davey flashed him a wicked smile, one that had to imply more than the boy realized, and said significantly, tonguing each syllable, “I promise you, if I need anything I’ll let you know,” and Jade could still feel the soft skin and the frightened heartbeat of Davey’s wrist in his hand that day he’d stalked the boy like prey, and he didn’t think he’d be able to hold himself back any longer, didn’t think he should have to, and Davey looked at him with those endless, burning eyes, and all the meanings of his purred words flooded over Jade’s skin with a thousand fluttering eyelash feet, tickling and tormenting and touching, touching, _touching_ —

 

 

 

Adam pulled into the driveway, noting with some interest the bike against the garage door, the rake sprawled prone in the front yard, the sickly little clump of clinging damp leaves, made slick by the unending rain, made brittle by the bottomless cold. But these were distractions, he decided. Maybe Jade had enlisted some hard-up student for yard maintenance; maybe Jade himself had felt like taking on a project. None of these things were the point. The point was, Kittingshire’s party was in a few scant hours, and priority number one was to get the owner of the bike out of the house so he could get into Jade.

Adam suddenly wished he’d brought flowers. No, that wasn’t the plan and no, Jade wouldn’t like them, but this Viking burn-pillage-rape routine didn’t suit his soft heart. He shook away that notion as well, reminding himself that at the moment all he could offer was a Viagra bouquet, and stuffed the crinkling, shredded packet of pills into his glove box, figuring that Jade wouldn’t have any reason to go into the glove box before he had time to hide them properly.

Striding up the front walk, Adam tried valiantly not to hum to himself. Best not to seem too eager, too cheerful—better to be silent, stern-faced, and dominating. If he seemed like he was asking, if he was anything but deadly certain, Jade would pull away with a scowl. Quaint notions of language and niceties were superfluous to what he wanted, if he wanted it with Jade.

 

 

 

Davey felt drunk, just looking into Jade’s blazing eyes. _Now there’s a thought_ , he distracted himself, trying desperately to think about anything, anything but the man just a few taunting inches away. _I should have gotten drunk before I came here. This would all be so much simpler without inhibitions—I’d be free to humiliate myself without restraint_. Davey would normally have grimaced at the thought, but his lips were currently occupied holding the drool in, because his irrelevant thoughts were the only thin, failing barrier left between him and the world in Jade’s eyes, the eternity under Jade’s skin.

A ragged breath escaped his crushed chest, the only sound in the room, for even his heart had stopped beating now. The next move was his, Davey knew. The decision to act or not to act, that was his. Jade looked more comfortable now, leaning forward as if drawn in by the force of Davey’s gaze, as if he didn’t know it was the other way around. Davey was in the process of thinking that the man still didn’t look exactly inviting when Jade shifted on the couch, spreading his legs and sinking back into the cushions, tipping his head lazily to one side, eye contact still binding. And now that he had done that, now that Jade had relaxed and let his thigh slide til it was a bare inch from Davey’s knee, _now_ he looked inviting.

 

 

 

Adam let himself in and hung up his coat, unwinding his scarf and tossing it over the coat rack. He slipped his shoes off, stretching his toes in grey woolen socks. He saw the light on in Jade’s study, the door flung open, and headed there.

 

 

 

“Jade,” Davey said, trying the name on for size and shape and flavor, “there is one thing.”

His heart was beating now; it thundered, as if to leap from his chest, bursting free to shower them both in blood and softer, slicker things… things that would make him shudder and cry out and die, gristle and tissue and bone, so happily at Jade’s side… Jade’s long, sinewed side… the flaxen hairs clinging to the back of Jade’s hand, catching the light and shining…

“And what’s that?” Jade asked, his oddly hoarse voice shaking Davey forcibly from bloody, lustful thoughts.

 

 

 

The study was empty. Adam was puzzled by this; when Jade was left home alone, he barely left the room. He’d eat and sleep and shave in it sooner than leave it, if Adam let him. It was his paper cocoon, the chrysalis his symphony had yet to crawl from, damp-winged and dripping. Stranger still was the drawer pulled too far out of the desk, so that it hung on a sickly angle, looking broken, violated. Most of its contents was slopped onto the floor around it, and what remained intact was hardly undisturbed; the bottom of the drawer was clearly visible, torn tape and its grimy residue marring its surface. Something had been freshly torn up.

What all of this pointed towards was a volatile Jade, a Jade even less stable and predictable than usual. And while trepidation dampened Adam’s appetite for sex, he was alarmed to note, his chemically assisted, clearly visible erection was undaunted.

 

 

 

Jade swung from Davey’s very breath as if it were a noose. He couldn’t begin to imagine what the boy was going to say. Or, more accurately, he could imagine only the thousands of things he most wanted to hear; he was not fit, however, to hazard any guesses based in reality.

And was it really so sick, was it really so wrong, to want Davey to say ‘you’ more than anything else? Was it really so twisted to imagine that, were he to touch and taste and possess the young man’s skin and soul and self, he could finish his symphony in a single stroke, could compose mankind’s greatest, most haunting tragedy in the work of an evening? Was it so deluded to imagine that if he were to slip into Davey’s empty places, into the space behind his eyes and the space below his lungs and, god, the delicate pockets of air in his knees, he might come out again with whatever magnificence burned there?

And hadn’t it once been said that the way to godhood was to eat a man’s beating heart? That the way to possess the qualities, the very essence of another, to be as they were, was to eat of their flesh? Didn’t the Catholic Church itself urge its followers to gorge on the body and drink deep of the blood of their lord and savior, so that they might one day become him?

No. No, that wasn’t right. He was confused and Jade knew it; he was tripping over his own feet, getting excited, getting hard, getting _away from himself_. What he needed was—Davey—no—what he needed was someone to ground him, someone to reign him in before he was carried away by his own madness, his own passion, his own desire—before he hurt someone, broke something, ruined everything.

But there was no one there to ground him. The only thing that was there was Davey’s lips, vital and flushed and poised to speak; Davey’s eyes, shy and brimming with things Jade couldn’t begin to imagine; Davey’s heart, throbbing with the truths that Jade used to hold in his own.

And god but Jade was starving.

 

 

 

Abandoning the study, Adam returned to the hall, trying to think the most sexually nullifying thoughts he could muster, because the Erection That Refused to be Dispelled was actually kind of troubling to him, having just taken his first-ever performance enhancing drug without doing more than bleeding on the list of warnings and side effects.

He should be rational. Okay, rationalizing, he told himself firmly. Being rational. He could do rational. Reason said that, if it wasn’t going away on its own, Operation: Seduce Jade was back on track. Adam headed towards the back of the house, to his makeshift library. Given the man’s habits of late, Adam couldn’t imagine a set of scenarios that would make Jade look for a book, but there was light streaming from the doorway.

Adam opened his mouth and called out,

 

 

 

 _You_. The word was on Davey’s tongue, about to leap, but he couldn’t quite let it go. It wasn’t—was it the right word? Was it too much? It was just, Davey couldn’t bring himself to say ‘kiss me’ because, well, he wasn’t a 1950s starlet, and Jade wasn’t Cary Grant. And even under those circumstances he’d feel ridiculous saying it.

But Jade was looking at him like he hadn’t eaten in years, like Davey was the most delicious thing he’d ever seen, and Davey couldn’t pretend not to notice it—couldn’t pretend not to notice Jade, Jade Puget, right here and wanting him. So fuck syntax and forget consequences: this was his moment. This was one chance to be alive. This was, for all intents and purposes, the last moment of his life—because wasn’t his life over anyway? What did he possibly have left to lose now?

Davey opened his mouth and said,

 

 

 

“Jade?”

 

 

 

“You.”

End Notes:

...So? As fun to read as it was to write? Please let me know; I hunger for you every thought, suggestion, and irrelevant comment!

Something I always wonder about is how many of you, if any of you, I've seen or met or simply walked past in my everyday life, neither of us knowing that we interact on this faceless level. So if you're ever in Illinois and see a red Jeep with a Jadam sticker on the back, you've found me.  
Love.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	7. Ghosts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! I don't own the boys and none of this ever happened. Thanks for reading, and thank you all for your kind reviews! I can't wait to hear what you'll have to say about this latest installment. You're going to see some silly, happy moments that you've been thus far deprived; and we're going to see a beloved character take a turn towards the sinister. Thank you again for taking the time to read and review; your thoughts mean the world to me, and I always love to chat!

Adam’s voice filled his ears and Jade jumped back from the edge as it if had burned him. (And maybe it had; it was too soon to tell. He’d have to wait for the smoke to clear before he could begin assessing damages.) Anything Davey might have spoken was obliterated by the strong, clear note of Adam’s voice, and for all that his dick was stiff and Davey’s knee was pressed boldly to his thigh and he wanted it, _wanted it_ , he had never heard anything so wonderful as Adam’s voice. He had never loved Adam so much and never gazed upon anything brighter or better than Adam, stepping into the room. He felt—well, honestly, he was relieved. He was relieved he hadn’t had to hear whatever taunting tidbit might have fled Davey’s lips; he was relieved he hadn’t had to respond to it, whatever it may or may not have been.

“Hey, Addy!” Jade cried out in a voice and manner entirely unlike his own, slipping off the couch and crossing the room to where sweet, blessed Adam stood, smiling but looking a little perplexed as he took in the scene. He gave Adam a one-armed embrace and pressed a chaste kiss to the stubbled cheek, an affectionate, welcoming ritual that he had never subscribed to. When they’d been younger, they had always exchanged heat and saliva when reuniting: it had seemed like time apart was unbearable, then. When the genuine thrill at Adam’s arrival had waned, Jade had allowed constancy to rob him of doting inclinations, paring down a lingering kiss to a peck to a hypocoristic greeting, on and on and on until it was flattering if he even looked up when Adam entered a room. The strength of his greeting, now, was a little overwhelming to both of them; Jade checked and rechecked it, thinking that surely he was only trying to make Davey jealous, but the thing held water. As far as he could tell, the gesture was sincere.

Adam slung an arm around Jade’s shoulders and squeezed briefly before dropping his arm to his side, conscious of Davey’s presence and registering offensively obvious shock at Jade’s sweetness. “Nice to see you, Davey,” Adam acknowledged Jade’s guest with a nod.

“Um, hi, Professor Carson,” Davey squeaked, suddenly looking very small and lost under the old afghan. Jade couldn’t be sure in the dim light of the single lit lamp, but Davey looked like he was blushing.

Adam’s eyes fell back to Jade’s, a question in them now. The only thing Jade wanted less than to answer the question was for Adam to ask it, so he did what was necessary. “Davey stopped by to borrow a recording,” he told Adam. He didn’t know why he was lying. He didn’t know why Davey borrowing a recording from him was any more plausible, any less suspicious, than the truth. He didn’t know why Adam should be suspicious anyway. He hadn’t done anything wrong—and not even Jade could believe that one for a second—and Adam trusted him, or at least ought to, after all these years.

“Antoine de Lhoyer,” Davey spoke up suddenly, and Jade didn’t understand the challenge present in his voice. “I mentioned him in my paper.”

Adam met Davey’s eyes without flinching, but something in his face was hard and cold. Jade began to feel a little lost as Davey got to his feet, leaving the afghan crumpled on the couch, and stood facing Adam: _The Dream Songs_ in one hand, the other knotted in a fist. Davey poured the roiling midnight of his eyes fiercely into Adam’s icy seawater stare, but Adam was up to the challenge. He stood at his full height, shoulders stretched broad and powerful, and frowned. “Did you?” Adam said coolly, disinterested, not playing.

“Yeah,” Davey pushed, truculent, not backing down. Lost as he was, Jade still noted the tremble in Davey’s legs, and the immeasurable calm that Adam may as well have been carved from. “I wondered, actually, if you wanted to talk about my paper with me at all.”

Adam smiled at Davey. The smile looked gentle, but Jade noticed how tight Adam’s face was behind it, how straight and strong and deadly the white line of his teeth. “Actually, Davey, if you don’t mind, we have a faculty party to get to.”

“I don’t mind at all!” Davey cried hotly, emotion all wrong for the exchange. Even Adam looked a little surprised by the young man’s anger. To Jade’s eyes, Davey looked young and small and helpless, and even the tight passion of his anger didn’t appeal to him then. Whatever the conversation Adam and Davey were having was really about, Jade didn’t doubt for a second which side of it he wanted to be on: the side with Adam on it. The presence and stability and calm of Adam, his Adam, seemed more erotic and desirable than Davey’s most brilliant fit of rage could hope to.

He’d scared himself, Jade realized belatedly. He’d gotten close enough to the fire to fall in, and while music raged within him like a storm at sea, desperate and thrashing to be penned, breaking itself upon the shore just to get his attention, he was frightened. It was an adrenaline rush, to be sure; and only moments ago, he had wanted more than anything to let go, give in, and tumble head over heels into Davey’s fiery flesh. It was only now, anchored once more, that he could see clearly how fire would consume, the horrible burns it would leave on his skin. That was why he could imagine wanting nothing but to cling to Adam’s side forever: he was frightened.  
This was a curious thing. An anomaly, certainly—worthy of further study. Jade had never believed into running from that which most scared him; he had always thought that the only way to live, the only way to call himself a man, was to dive headfirst into that which terrified him.

But these were thoughts for another time. Davey brushed past Jade on his way out the door, lithe form singeing him with desire everywhere it touched, even as he recoiled. Together, he and Adam tailed Davey to the door, and whatever words were spoken ghosted past Jade’s ears; time only started flowing again when Adam turned to him, teeth bared, and made a sound low in his throat. Then their lips were crashing together, their bodies slamming, and the whole world disintegrated around him and all Jade knew was sex, and pain, and sacrifice, and love, and always, always, that battered bloody corpse of time, dragging itself around and around the clock face, counting down to the end of his days.

He forgot entirely fire.

 

 

Two licentious hours later, and Adam could have screamed with the frustration. They had fucked and fucked and fucked, until even Jade had had enough, and still his erection held its ground; still he met no release. What had been exquisite agony an hour before was now bordering on torture. For his part, Jade lay prone and spent on the bed, staring at the thing in awe and dragging wondering fingers across the turgid length of it.

“It’s like an alien,” he proclaimed, dazed and drunk from the evening’s hedonic ambush. “Look at it,” he urged, and Adam pressed his head back into the pillow as hard as he could to keep from crying out, to keep from slapping Jade’s hand away, because the feeling of those familiar fingers was just too _much_. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio,” Adam said through gritted teeth.

“Think about my grandma Maribel,” Jade suggested, and Adam privately thought that the real marvel was this light-hearted, sweet mood of Jade’s, but then through the haze of hurt and need _everything_ seemed foreign and obscure. Jade gave a wicked little laugh, stroking the thing again. “Think about your grandma Jeanette! Grandma Jeanette, naked, swaying her raisin body and licking her lips.” When Adam’s demon penis did not relent, Jade giggled, dropping his head to rest on Adam’s soft stomach.

“All right, you’ve had your fun,” Adam said at last, rolling onto his side, facing away. “Get up, we’ve got to get ready for the party.”

“You’re grumpy,” Jade accused, still laughing at him. Adam loved him so much in that moment; in spite of everything, there was nothing Adam wanted more than to spend his life with Jade. (Well, that and for his erection to go away. Because come _on_.)

“You would be too!” Adam snapped back, smile belying his annoyance and rolling off the bed, cursed dick assuming a mathematically precise 90 degree angle as he stood. You could have measured triangles with the monstrosity. Engineers could have used it in place of their slide rules. Pyramids could have been built. “Ass out of bed, Puget.”

Jade burrowed into the sheet, burying all his face but puppy dog eyes and overgrown bangs in a pillow. “Do I have to?” he wheedled, cute as hell and knowing it. “It’s going to be so _boring_.”

“You can talk to Melanie,” Adam suggested, trying to flatten his dick enough to zip up his dress pants. It was an undignified struggle.

Jade was giggling again. “You look ridiculous,” he said, eyeing the rather obvious bulge in Adam’s pants. Adam pressed it down again; when he took his hand away, it sprung back up, undeterred.

“Stunning observation. I thank you,” Adam muttered, sarcastic, pulling on a white button-down. “What do you think, babe?” he asked after a moment, threading a limp black tie through his collar. He turned so Jade could see him, though the man’s eyes hadn’t left him once. As ludicrous as this all was, Adam felt like a kid again, happy and uncomplicated with his whole life ahead of him, so, so lucky to have Jade’s eyes on him, hoping against hope that they’d never look away.

“I think,” Jade said slowly, seriously, scanning every inch of Adam’s form as he buttoned up his shirt, “that I can see your penis through your pants.”

“That’s it!” Adam cried, tugging his tie out and whipping it at Jade, who shrieked and rolled, pulling a pillow on top of him like a shield. Adam fell upon the bed, wrestling for control of the pillow as Jade yelped and tried to kick him off. A few moments disappeared in carefree horseplay, grappling and wrestling and Jade’s little screams, and Adam had never been so glad to be who he was. And then fighting turned to kissing, and Jade was murmuring, “Let me try one more time,” and another handful of minutes or maybe hours slipped away into Jade’s mouth, until finally, gasping, Adam pulled out, dick shining with spit but no less rigid, still tauntingly close to a seemingly unreachable orgasm.

“Still playing hard to get?” Jade asked, breathless, in the low, lazy voice he used after sex, and then cracked up laughing at the terrible pun.

“Shut up,” Adam muttered adoringly, smacking the back of Jade’s delightfully bare thigh with his hand before hopping back into his pants and shrugging into his dinner jacket. He glanced at his watch— _shit_ —and then at Jade’s beloved body, looking to Adam’s blurred eyes for all the world as it had the day they’d met, years dropping away into the shadows, Jade 24 again and glorious. “Fine, you can stay home, but you’re really missing out on some choice conversation,” he sighed at last, undone by the perfection he perceived.

“You should probably take notes so you can fill me in on all the exciting details when you get home,” Jade told him, mock-studiously, silly and sweet and so precious.

“Oh, fuck you,” Adam laughed, shaking his head and turning for the door.

“Wait, don’t go yet!” Jade cried out suddenly, vaulting out of bed and running at him, stark naked and beautiful. Sticking out the tip of his tongue in concentration, his long, deft fingers twirled and knotted Adam’s forgotten tie, and with great tenderness he snugged it up to Adam’s throat. “There,” he announced when he was finished, and pressed a kiss to Adam’s lips. “Now you’re perfect.”

Adam Carson was the happiest man in the world.

 

 

Jade had things to write, big and important and life-altering things, but for all that the music pounded in his head, he was too happy just then to accomplish anything. What he did instead was empty all of Adam’s secret hiding places of the booze they concealed. It wasn’t that Adam was such a drinker, Jade admitted to himself; it was that he was such a shrew that Adam felt obligated to keep the stuff out of his sight. Most of the bottles were full, save for a few fingers, and the variety impressed Jade. He hadn’t realized the collection had grown quite so vast and sundry while he’d been busy frowning disapprovingly in the other direction. It would be nice, he thought to himself as he relieved several large, dusty history volumes of the spirits concealed behind them—Adam always thought he was so fucking clever, as if Jade didn’t know every single one of his tricks—it would be nice to keep all the liquor in one place, maybe where people could actually see it. After all, some of it looked like quality stuff, or at least better than the swill they’d used to drink. Not that he’d ever been much for it, himself. It would be nice, really, to get Adam a sideboard, or a liquor cabinet. It would certainly be an upgrade of class. How embarrassing it would be, Jade mused as he lined up the myriad bottles by size, to offer a guest a drink and then pull a bottle out of the broom closet, or from under the sofa, or from behind the flour in the kitchen, or from beneath the sink. It wasn’t as if they had guests, really, but it still seemed like a thoughtful gift.

Once he had all the bottles assembled, Jade got a Coke out of the fridge and began siphoning sips off each of them in turn, going down the line and grimacing when the flavor hit his tongue. Bitter and burning, he swallowed from each what he thought would be an unnoticeable amount, feeling like a teenager skimming the tops off his parents’ collection.

It was just that he felt so _good_ right now—so outside himself. So very like he wasn’t Jade Puget at all, but someone else, someone normal, someone happy—someone who was even capable of being happy, someone who didn’t turn everything he touched to shit, someone who didn’t sow misery and dissent deliberately and without remorse. He didn’t want to lose this feeling, this feeling of being someone else, anyone else, so long as it wasn’t himself. So he’d go wild, he’d be stupid, he’d be reckless; how else to keep himself at bay? How else to make this feeling last?

By the time he reached the end of the line, Jade had drunk more than he had in years and he could no longer which bottle had been hidden where. In fact—and Jade giggled, deliriously glad, and the world spun merrily around him, lights twinkling—he wondered if he’d drunk this much, ever. He was happy—so happy. He couldn’t wait for Adam to get home! He couldn’t imagine why he didn’t do this every night. Warm and dizzy and happy and drunk—feeling, in every way, utterly unlike himself. He felt, in that moment, as if nothing might ever touch him again—and so, it was naturally at that precise moment that his phone began to ring.

Jade fumbled for his cell, squinting at the display. Even with his glasses, the print was damned small. From what he could see, at least, it wasn’t a number he recognized. Standard protocol dictated that he let calls like these—and any calls, really—go straight to voicemail, but the forceful solitude that came with drinking alone was beginning to hit him, and he answered after only a moment of hesitation—even a telemarketer would be nice to talk to. He was so happy, having such a good time; he wanted everyone else to feel it too.

“’Lo?” Jade slurred with a smile. Maybe Adam was calling from someone else’s phone, he thought happily. He’d like to talk to Adam. He’d ask if his ridiculous erection had gone away yet. Jade giggled a little at the thought.

“Have you been drinking?” came back at him over the line. The voice, a man’s, was vaguely familiar, like something he’d heard in one of those faraway dreamlike moments that, as a child, he’d never been able to say for sure had occurred outside his head, but he couldn’t place it.

“This is Jade Puget,” Jade said, the niggling familiarity of the voice and impertinence of the greeting shoving him back towards sobriety, towards seriousness. He pulled himself together, stopped having fun, concentrated. “Who am I speaking to?”

The voice, familiar or not, sounded weary now, softer. “You’re right,” it sighed. “It’s late, certainly after business hours. In fact I wouldn’t be calling myself if I hadn’t been in the bottle.” There was a silence, contemplative. Jade held his ground, not interested, waiting the mystery caller out. Sooner or later he’d tire of the cryptic shit and answer Jade’s question. “You don’t recognize my voice, do you?” the man asked next. “God, it’s been a lot of years.”

That’s when Jade got it. The voice—he knew it. The cadence of age and regret and exhaustion, as if just being near him was utterly draining, clicked. It was Jerry, Jerry Finn. Jerry was returning his call! Jerry was returning his call at, shit—one a.m. on the West coast. That wasn’t good news, no matter how he looked at it. If this was about music, Jerry would have called in the daytime hours, gazing out on the bay from his office’s picture window and kneading his brow with his free hand.

“Jerry,” Jade said, reserved. His guard was up now, the alcohol like a dull buzz behind his brain. A claw of vodka was twisting itself up in his guts, and he noticed the tremor in his arms. He’d had too much. “I didn’t think you’d call.”

“Me neither,” Jerry said, snorting a derogatory little laugh. “You made us all look like fools, Puget.”

“None so much as me,” Jade agreed, voice hollow but not glum. He was calm; he had come to terms with his failures. Today was day 19,001; today he was turning things around. The past couldn’t touch him anymore.

Jerry went on: “And you wouldn’t believe the money the agency lost. Refunding all those tickets, paying the halls and the orchestra—that was a lot of debt.”

“You pulled through,” Jade said, matter-of-factly. Because Jerry had. And that, Jade felt, counted for something. Because sometimes he felt like he’d never made it out alive; sometimes he felt like the day the tour ended, the day the shows were cancelled and everyone was yelling and it was all he could do to stumble numbly into a bathroom before he began to cry—sometimes he felt like that day he took the broken pieces of his career and dragged them across his wrists and bled out screaming and died, and no one even noticed, no one even knew, and no one ever saw the scars.

Jerry gave his derisive snort again. “Why’d you call, Jade?”

Jade steeled himself. He’d heard that booze was liquid courage, but as it sloshed around inside him it felt only like so much vomit, so many words. “I finished my adagio,” he spit out all at once, unhappy combination of liquor clenching and churning within. “The scherzo will be done within a month. We could set up a recording crew, book a holiday show at the Boston Opera House.”

Jerry did not waste time snorting. Instead, he let loose a full-throated guffaw, laughing until he wheezed, until Jade knew without having to see that there were tears in his eyes, wet running down his red cheeks. He swallowed his irritation, his urge to snap, and its acrid flavor turned his stomach. Finally, in between tremulous, hysterical laughs, Jerry said, “You think I’d… set up a show… for _you_? After what happened _last_ time?” Jerry was off, cackling again, but without joy this time. “Oh, you are a funny, funny man!”

Jade gritted his teeth and took it. He took the laughter, took the mockery, and let it wash over him. “I’ve got the material this time,” he bit out quietly when Jerry’s bitter laughter finally faded. “One show, Jerry; a small sound crew.”

“I’m sorry, Jade, but there’s no way,” Jerry interrupted Jade’s thought sharply. The laughter had hardened something in him, Jade saw; had filled the soft spots in his armor, the vulnerabilities in his defense. There was no amount of pleading that was going to sway Jerry Finn, and that suited Jade just fine. He wasn’t much for beseeching, himself.

“Need I remind you,” Jade said evenly, measuring out each syllable, the shape of each word, “that we have a contract?”

On the other end of the line, there was silence. And then, the sound of carefully contained rage, Jerry’s thin hiss of a whisper: “Oh no. Oh no we fucking don’t! Not anymore we fucking don’t!”

“We signed for twelve shows in six cities,” Jade said calmly, alcohol still lunging and surging uneasily inside him. “We did three shows, two cities.”

“You fucking fuck!” Jerry bellowed, and now Jade could hear the drink in his voice, the age and the anger torn open anew. “You didn’t deliver the goddamn material! The critics tore my agency _apart_. It’s on _you_ , Puget. You failed to uphold _your_ end. I did every fucking thing I promised to, and what did you do? You lied to me about having new material! You lied to me, and you didn’t have shit, and _that’s_ why the deal fell through. And you fucking know it.”

“Well. Be as that may,” Jade said calmly, rationally, the voice of reason. “I have new material now.” There was a silence that was deafening, and as it quivered between them, Jade filled it with his words. “So this is your chance to be done with me forever. I’m willing to let eight of those unfulfilled tour dates slide, Jer, for one night in Massachusetts, for one tiny sound crew. We do this, we tear up the contract. In fact—if you want it in writing—draw up a new contract. One show in Boston and all our other contracts are null and void, and I’ll never work with your agency again.”

“You have new material this time?” Jerry said at length.

“Yes,” Jade said. Patient.

“You really, really have it this time.”

“Yes.”

“Because so help me god—”

“Jerry? I’ve got it.”

Jerry took a deep, steadying breath. “Okay,” he said. “Fine.” A pause, and then: “If you don’t—”

“I do,” Jade cut in, forestalling the threat. “This time I do.”

Jerry sighed again. “Can’t believe I’m agreeing to this,” he muttered under his breath. “I’ll overnight an account packet on Monday. Now get the fuck off the phone and finish your damn symphony.”

“One more thing, Jerry,” Jade said, smile spreading uncontained.

“Fuck you,” Jerry countered, sounding harassed and angry and tired.

“It’s good. What I’ve been writing. It’s really fucking good.”

“It better be,” Jerry said darkly, but there was softness there. He’d always loved Jade’s music. That’s why he’d put so much on the line for the tour of an unfinished symphony, to awaken the hearts and minds of the nation to what he’d heard as nothing short of genius. He’d invested all his capital and more on the tour; it had been the most ambitious venture of his career. And after that had almost ruined him, even when it had all but finished him off for good, Jade knew, could hear, the utter conviction behind Jerry’s words—the total faith that, whatever it was Jade had written, no matter how long it had taken him, it was worth this fresh new risk—it was good.

Jade snapped his handheld shut, elation turning all the lead in his body into lightness and air, and he felt happy, he felt good, he felt like this was the right thing.

Less than ten minutes later, Jade clung to the toilet bowl, doubled over in the bathroom, vomiting up years of poison and bile, a thick film of liquor in his mouth, in the water. His body seized, going rigid with each heave, beyond his control; and copper and venom and more poured out, splattering the bathroom floor, purging his body, purging his soul.

 

 

It had been a trying two hours, but between the cold, the heavily poured cognac and creams, the rich, overcooked meal, and a last-ditch self-administered punch to the gut, Adam’s erection was finally gone. Feeling safe to stand up and move around the room—in other words, fraternize—really freed up his mingling options. Adam plastered his merriest smile to his face and dove into the crowd, engaging with fierce cheerfulness in all manner of small talk and meaningless department politics, shaking hands and forgetting names, faces all blending into one conservative, aging, Republican mask. He charmed and cracked jokes and endured pictures of sons and daughters and pink wrinkled grandchildren, all with a smile on his face. He was polite and debonair and quick with whatever witticism the situation called for; he made rounds of the party, shaking hands and making friends and establishing himself as a gregarious, likeable piece of the faculty. All in all, things were going well; he was glad Jade had stayed home after all. And when he felt confident enough, when he felt brave, he finished off his drink and fetched Burgan’s wine from the coat closet where it nestled.

Bottle in hand, Adam approached Kittingshire’s plush armchair with a winning smile on his face. Burgan, at the edge of Kittingshire’s entourage, gave Adam an encouraging nod, and maybe it was the cognac and maybe it was serendipity, but it seemed to Adam that the ranks of professors parted to give him access to the retiring chairman, face puckered with age, cheeks rosy from the pleasure of a circle of men praising his life, his work. Adam could see how the swell of ego of such an occasion would grow comfortable, a warm envelope of validation for his accomplishments. He suddenly felt nervous, like his offering was paltry or untoward; but there was nothing to be done for it. He stepped forward into the circle, putting himself, his trust, in Burgan’s hands.

“Adam Carson, history department,” he introduced himself warmly, giving the old man’s hand a firm shake.

Kittingshire split a toothy grin. “I hear you boys are a pack of scoundrels!” he said in his great wheezing voice. For all that he couldn’t be a day under 80, his voice was still commanding, so that everyone around them drew in, stilled their conversations so as to listen. The circle of men nearest them contributed a well-timed chuckle. “Have a seat, Carson.” Even as Kittingshire spoke, the armchair he gestured at was vacated by a disgruntled art professor. Adam could see, now, that the other two armchairs were positions of favor; those displaced from them skulked off, and those grappling for their chance at them jostled in the adoring circle, eager to be nominated.  
Adam sat, aware of the envious eyes upon them. It seemed Burgan wasn’t the only one with the idea that Kittingshire might turn the tides of a department’s fortune with his last night as chairman of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences board. Still, he found himself hoping that the ploy would work. He didn’t often play the politics game—he didn’t mind it so much, didn’t think it was much more than being helpful and kind, but having Jade in his life had always precluded him from social outings and pandering to his superiors alike—and could tell that his face was foreign to most of the dedicated ass-kissers in attendance.

“What have you brought me, then?” Kittingshire asked, eyeing the cabernet with a strange mix of delight and greed.

“A pittance, I’m afraid,” Adam said, handing over the bottle, label up, while eyeing the great tangle of boxes and bottles already heaped beside Kittingshire’s chair. But he needn’t have worried; Kittingshire’s eyes skittered over the label manically, palming the glass and stroking the neck.

“Oh,” the old man said hoarsely. “But this is what we drank at my daughter’s wedding, Mr. Carson. How—how could you have known? I’ve been looking for this bottle since…” Kittingshire’s eyes had taken on a damp sheen now, and he shook his head, still transfixed by the bottle he held. “Since what happened,” he finished, voice stronger but no less soft. His eyes, filmed with some faraway agony, drifted up to alight on Adam’s face. “Adam Carson, you said?” he asked, and Adam nodded, resisting the urge to toss a questioning glance Burgan’s way. “I… I met you at a faculty party, didn’t I, when you started here?” Adam shook his head—no. He’d met Kittingshire, shaken his hand, at his very first interview. Kittingshire had joined him and Burgan for a tour of the grounds and had shown him the office that would be his, should he accept the offer. Tonight’s Kittingshire, almost four years older and looking it, waved his hand to dismiss the discrepancy. “Never mind all that. What I mean to say is, I regret not knowing you better. You’ve given me a wonderful gift, and I don’t… I’m afraid I don’t know how to thank you.”

The gloss to the old man’s eyes had turned to tears now, and when he gave Adam a trembling smile and squeezed his shoulder in a fatherly way, Adam felt a little ill. The gift was a deception; it did not warrant such ingenuous gratitude. He felt the truth on his tongue, about to burst out—the gift wasn’t from him, not really. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known anything about a daughter or anything of the sort—he had known only what Burgan had told him, that Kittingshire liked wine. Somehow he didn’t believe that anymore. There was no way that this, whatever this was, was an accident.

Somehow Adam made it through the night; Kittingshire recovered from the gift, although he kept the bottle at his elbow the rest of the night, smoothing a thumb over the label during conversational lulls, and boisterously bullied his young successor, one Emile Cole, and every board member he could get his hands on to ‘take care’ of Adam. Adam’s head swam with guilt each time Kittingshire told someone how thoughtful and promising he was, every time he said that they’d be fools to lose him. He even cast about for Burgan, looking at interrogate him about Adam’s standing in the department, but the man was nowhere to be found.

Adam did find him. When he’d been excused at last from Kittingshire’s effusions, he’d taken up the hunt immediately. He’d tracked Burgan out to the smoking balcony, where his breath hung in the air like so many ice crystals and his hands where stiff and red from the cold. Burgan fumbled with his pipe, clumsily packing a fresh bowl when Adam stepped out after him.

“The hell was that, Burgan?” Adam asked calmly, not bothering to greet his friend, not bothering to tiptoe around things delicately. And maybe it was this tendency, maybe it was this bluntness, that had truly kept him out of college politics—maybe Jade was little more than an excuse to hide behind, to cover up his lack of social graces. Because Adam did not have the stomach for deception, for games of cat and mouse. Burgan had done something he ought not have, not without Adam’s permission, and there was nothing Adam wanted so much as answers. He didn’t have delicacy in him just then, and he didn’t see a need for it.

Burgan offered Adam a wan smile, loose tobacco showering from his shaking hands. He held out his pipe, the pouch of leaves. “Would you?” he asked quietly. Adam took the pipe and packed it quickly, inexpertly, for all that Melanie had shown him the way. He thrust it back to Burgan with undue force.

“That wine—” Adam started in again, but Burgan held up a matchbook. “Please,” Burgan said. “I’ve mislaid my gloves—my hands are quite useless in the cold. Arthritis, you see.” Adam lit the pipe, the precision of it jarring loose his impatience, his anger. He felt tricked, deceived—like he had taken advantage of the old man, and he’d never meant to.

Finally, the pipe was lit, the pouch closed and stuffed into an overcoat pocket, fragrant smoke swirling through the clouds of their breath. The night was cold and dark indeed, the ghost of the match’s flame spotting Adam’s vision. “That wasn’t just a bottle you had sitting around your house, was it,” Adam said at last, breaking the night’s heavy silence.

Burgan laughed humorlessly. “Liza was born twelve years after his sons, when he was already an old man,” he said, quiet voice seeming to fill up the whole of the night, the whole of the sky. Words Adam didn’t particularly want to hear slithered over his skin. “She was the light of his life, Carson. She died a few months after her wedding—complications with her pregnancy. Her wedding, it’s the last happy memory Kittingshire has. You gave him an amazing gift tonight, Carson—one he won’t forget. There’s no need to be angry.”

“You lied to me,” Adam said quietly. The scope of the story was more than he could bear. A dead daughter, an old man mourning; the wine he’d so casually given was one Kittingshire had looked for for years, as if tasting it one last time would bring her back to him, as if the flavor on his tongue would heal the wounds he had suffered. It wasn’t a gift; it had been a cruel trick.

“I helped you,” Burgan corrected. “You’d never have accepted it if you’d known. You’ll have tenure before summer term, I expect.”

“You could have given him the bottle yourself,” Adam said bitterly, feeling hollowed out, feeling numb in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. It was hard to put his anger into words, hard to explain the sickly, curdled guilt in his gut.

“Yes,” Burgan agreed, meaning giving weight to his words. “I could have.”

 _Why didn’t you_ , Adam wanted to ask, but he couldn’t get the words out. In any event, it seemed pointless to ask; Burgan was about as likely to give him a straight answer as he was to burst into song, he saw that now. The man’s motives were, as ever, a mystery to him; he knew only that the favors Burgan had done him, the kindnesses he had shown, surpassed the care a department head would show for a professor he was keen to keep; it even surpassed the bonds of tentative friendship that had webbed between them during Adam’s time at Amherst. Adam couldn’t help but feel a little like a chess piece, a pawn in Burgan’s esoteric game.

“You can’t just do things like that to people,” Adam said at length, voice weak with his frustration. For all that the man was so cold and frail he hadn’t been able to light his own pipe, Adam found himself feeling utterly helpless. “You just—you can’t.”

Burgan put a hand to Adam’s shoulder, in the same place that Kittingshire had. For God’s sake! He was fifty years old! He had had enough of people treating him like a young man—of people taking him under their wing, patronizing him. Still, he didn’t dare to shrug away; that would shift his reasonable opposition to what Burgan had done into an overdramatic temper tantrum, defeating the entire I’m-a-grown-man case he was trying to make. “You’ll thank me,” Burgan said, and took his hand away. Some of the tension flowed out of Adam’s shoulders, though his teeth remained gritted.

Adam ached for a snappy rebuttal, some kind of acerbic line he could disarm Burgan with, a way to put his friend in his place. It was an uncommonly aggressive urge, and Adam was glad to ignore it. Wasn’t he overreacting, after all? That’s what Jade would tell him, surely. By Monday, he told himself, an uneasy peace settling over him, all this would be forgotten.

End Notes:

I thank you in advance for filling out that little box below. Don't be silent; let me know what you think! I thrive on it! What's going on with Hunter? Where's Davey? Will Jade make good on his promise this time? I want to know what you think! I'll be back Wednesday with the answers to at least some of your questions. Love.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	8. Intangible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to be honest with you. I wrote this entire chapter last night after work in a deadline-fueled frenzy. So you may find it rife with my typing mistakes. However, I think that you will enjoy it--there's a present for you, at the end. It's something unexpected, I think, and different; it's also the first truly dissociative writing I've done in many years. Read and enjoy--I don't own, this didn't happen--and let me know what you think!

Davey couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t fucking believe it. All this time he’d thought Prof. Carson was a good guy, on his side—all this time he’d asked himself what the hell he was doing, trying to insinuate himself into the man’s life like that. All this time he’d shown up for lectures and taken notes and completed assignments, having no idea— _no idea!_ —what a bastard Prof. Carson really was.

And, okay. Maybe it was irrational to hate Prof. Carson for not seeing his partner in a romantic situation with Davey, metaphorical tie on the doorknob, and backing the fuck away, but Davey did it anyway. He’d been so close—so close to Jade. So close to saying _take me, teach me, mark me, make me yours_ ; and Jade had been so, so close to saying _yes_.

Davey threw his bike unceremoniously at the rack outside his dormitory, pausing to scowl up at the tiny, battered moth throwing itself again and again at the light above the door. The thing flew with a deranged determination, smashing itself against the bulb and burning, thrown away in pain and blindness only to catch sight of the rays once more and dive again. Every time it reached the edge of the light’s halo, nearly free, it wheeled back in again, hellbent on immolation. Davey failed to see any significance in this display, instead muttering “Stupid creature” and batting it out of the air in one ill-tempered swipe. The moth, dusty and brown and—Davey privately held—somehow creepy, fluttered for a moment against the pavement; then it was back into the air, back at the light.

“You know why they do that, don’t you?” a voice came from behind him. He started, whirling around with fear on his lips, only to find Nick stepping out of the shadows. He had a peculiar look on his face, faraway and almost bored, but dark around the eyes. He had a sweatshirt on, hood drawn up around his face, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans.

“Christ, Nick,” Davey said, trying to sound relieved though he wasn’t, not quite, and couldn’t say why. “You scared me.”

“They get confused,” Nick went on, as if Davey hadn’t spoken. “They use lunar light to navigate. All these fluorescents, moths think each one is the moon. And they fly into them over and over, until they fry themselves.”

“That’s… interesting,” Davey said slowly, not sure why Nick thought he cared about moths, not sure why Nick, of all people, looked so serious. “Since when are you a moth expert?”

Nick stepped closer to Davey, farther into the light. The shadow his hood cast on the planes of his face only served to make him look more ominous. “They think they’re headed where they want to go, Dave, but they’re just confused. It’s a fake moon, and they’re only hurting themselves.”

Davey could no longer pretend not to realize that Nick was getting at something. “I’m freezing,” he said, opting for a subject change. “Let’s go inside.”

Nick stood his ground. “Professor Carson, Dave. You’re still seeing him, aren’t you?”

Davey could have laughed in his friend’s face at that. Nick simply had no idea—no idea how wrong he was, or how right. Davey felt in that moment that Nick did not know him at all—that Nick had no idea what he thought, or what he felt. That Nick himself was _incapable_ of thinking or feeling as he did—that Davey could feel the world moving around them so much more acutely than Nick could dream to. A thought flickered in Davey’s head, a thought that spoke in Jade’s voice: _Fuck nursing. You think and feel and live so much better, so much more, than they ever could. You’re an artist. You’re a writer. No one else understands._ Davey could not blame Nick for being misguided, for Davey had failed to guide him—to see him, really, much at all since he’d gotten that damning letter earlier in the week. However, Davey _could_ blame him for simply not knowing, not seeing, not _sensing_ what was true and right and good, as Jade could, as artists did.

And so Davey blamed him. “What the shit are you talking about?”

Nick rolled his eyes. Davey was more comfortable with an exasperated Nick than a serious Nick, the former being a far more frequent occurrence. “You don’t hang out with me anymore,” he said, shrugging. “And this guy, Davey? He’s not your friend, okay? _I’m_ your friend. Tabby’s your friend. Carson’s just some gross old dude and, honestly, if he’s making you do this for an A you should report him.”

Davey didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t Nick know—couldn’t Nick _see_ —that his world was crumbling beneath him? That as it all disintegrated into blackening ash, the last, best hope of David Marchand was to hold tight to Jade Puget, that he might make the world anew from those selfsame ashes? What he needed right now was not a lecture from his friend. What he needed right now was—was—

Davey had no idea what he needed right now. He was pretty comfortably certain, though, that it wasn’t Nick baying in his face about moths and some old guy he’d never even slept with, though. “You don’t know anything,” Davey heard himself saying. “You don’t fucking get it. So stay out of it, okay?”

His voice sounded louder than he’d expected it to, and Nick looked affronted, somehow, like he hadn’t asked for this by sticking his fucking face into everything. “We’re worried about you,” Nick said in a quiet voice, looking at the toes of his scuffed Converse instead of Davey. The toes of those shoes made Davey mad, suddenly. Like by wearing them, Nick was trying too hard to be something that no one could _try_ to be—something that someone was, or else wasn’t.

Everything about his friend only made him remember everything he’d lose along with his scholarship. Everything about his friend only made him hurt. Davey thought about the letter still sitting on his desk, thought about the GPA requirement for the nursing program, thought about the organic chem class he hadn’t bothered to show up for all week. He thought about how what he was going through felt a lot like love but looked a lot like depression. He thought about how much he didn’t want to leave Amherst, didn’t want to leave Nick or Tabby or any of it. He thought about how he didn’t want to be a nurse so much anyway. He thought about how maybe he’d like to be a writer instead.

He thought about how getting chucked out of Amherst meant he’d never see Jade again.

“So come in with me, yeah?” Davey said, voice back at a normal volume, something breaking in it. Whatever else might be in the world, in his fucking life, one thing was certain: he’d been alone enough today. He didn’t want to be alone tonight.

Nick cracked a smile, though it was an unconvincing one. “Yeah,” Nick said, nodding. “I’d like that.”

 

 

Davey told Nick everything.

Or, not quite everything. Nick didn’t mention Prof. Carson again; Davey couldn’t bring himself to mention Jade. Instead, he showed Nick the letter from the advisory board. Nick’s face drained of color as he scanned the page. Davey knew just by looking that it was worse than Nick had expected. He could relate: it was worse than he’d expected, too. He’d known he was struggling with calculus, and that he could just forget an A in organic chem; but academic probation? He hadn’t seen that coming.

“I had no idea,” Nick said quietly. “Is that why you’ve been…?”

Davey shook his head. “I didn’t sleep with Prof. Carson,” he told Nick. Following his recent epiphany that Prof. Carson was a Jade-hoarding bastard, he couldn’t stand the idea of his friend thinking that.

Nick gave him a thin smile. “Maybe you should have,” he joked lightly, gesturing to the letter laying felled on the desk. Davey joined him in a distracted chuckle at that, until Nick ruined everything, saying, “You know, Tabby’s really good at calc. I bet she’d love to help you. And—”

Davey did his best not to scowl. “Remember the part of the letter where it said my GPA is down to a 2.7? I’m not getting into the nursing program, Nick. It’s not happening.”

A look of real despair crossed Nick’s face. “You can’t just give up!” he cried. “We can fix this. We’ll start having, I don’t know, study marathons, and you can make an appointment with the board, and you can get your GPA back up by the end of the semester! It’s not that bad.”

Swallowing hard, Davey spoke: “I need a 3.5 for the program, Nick. I’m not even going to apply.” Once he’d said it, Davey knew it was true. Maybe— _maybe_ ¬—he could muster the 3.0 he needed to keep his scholarship.

Nick’s face had fallen even further at this. “Dave,” he said, almost pleadingly. “What the hell else are you going to do?”

 _I’m going to be a writer_ , Davey thought, tentative, trying the words on for size. He wasn’t ready to say it yet, though—the goosebumps he’d gotten told him he was barely ready to think it. He couldn’t imagine anything more romantic, or frightening, or difficult than the arduous task of pouring his soul out onto a sheet of paper and hoping someone (anyone) liked it enough to give him money for it. And maybe Jade’s praise had given him false confidence; and maybe Jade’s blazing philosophy had deluded him; but Davey didn’t know what else to do but try.

His next thought was, _my parents are going to kill me for this_. On impulse, Davey grabbed Nick by the arm. “Thanksgiving,” he said abruptly. “You’re not going to fly back to California for it, right?”

Nick, looking wary, looking confused, said, “…Right. I’m not flying home until Christmas. But what—?”

Davey didn’t even let Nick form the question. “Come to Rochester with me. You can have Thanksgiving with my family.”

A smile spread over Nick’s face, and he finally tugged off his ridiculous hood. “I’d like that,” he said, nodding, smiling, and Davey knew that he was forgiven—that it would be all right. It wasn’t much, but it felt like it was enough.

 

 

The trick of it was—the trick of keeping his scholarship and not getting chucked out of Amherst, that is—was never seeing Jade again. It would be simple, Davey told himself. All he had to do was stay away from Sycamore Avenue; it wasn’t like he’d ever seen Jade, in nearly two years at Amherst, before the fateful day he’d gone to Prof. Carson’s house. It was true that Jade had come and found him, once, but Davey didn’t think that would be happening again. He’d been perfectly clear with Jade, Davey felt, about what he wanted; he knew that Jade had felt it too, the wild surging energy between them, drying out his throat and giving his hands over to shaking. And Jade hadn’t wanted it, him, in the end—Davey knew this because, if Jade had wanted him, he would have, at the very least, glanced back at Davey as he bounded to Prof. Carson’s side. He would have at least spoken as Prof. Carson all but threw Davey out—would have said or done _something_ , even just held a certain look in his roan eyes.

Davey was, at best, an appetizer. An idle plaything to pass the hours Prof. Carson spent away. And if that wasn’t being fair—if Jade took an honest, fatherly interest in Davey’s writing, if Jade really did see something promising in the great tangle of words Davey had given him—it still wasn’t any place Davey ought to be. He had proved already that he couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing—or even the smart thing—when it came to Jade. The man, intoxicating and beautiful as he was, was a distraction. Maybe Jade was the best thing in the world for Davey, and maybe he was the worst; but right now, Davey needed his wits about him.

On the other hand, if he was going to try and be an artist, there was no one better to counsel him than Jade.

It was a difficult decision, but even as premature regret began to gnaw at him, Davey felt good about it. He hadn’t been himself lately—skipping classes, neglecting homework, functionally ignoring his friends. He’d become an entirely different person, a kind of void—flayed by fire, crazed by lust, ruled by impulse.

The worst of it was how good it felt, even when it hurt. The worst of it was that Jade’s manic siren song made Davey feel more free, more alive, more _human_ than anything else ever had. It would be the easiest thing in the world, he knew, to look into Jade’s eyes and go under, sink into fire and sex and art and immolation. Because when he was with Jade, Davey felt like he was somebody—like he could change the world.

Everyone else—even his family, even his friends—saw nothing of the sort in him. To them, the most important, noble work he could ever hope to do was take blood and change catheters and make the last miserable moments of some poor bastard’s life more comfortable. That was, in truth, why Davey had chosen nursing—it wasn’t what he’d told Jade. It was that he’d always felt within him the ache to be special, to be recognized, to—if not make a difference—at the very least be a household name, a weighty leather-bound Great American Genius on every bookstore’s shelves. He’d always believed quietly—devoutly—in his own specialness, his own talent, his own potential. He’d always considered himself an artist born, always believed that he could change lives and hearts and worlds with his words alone.

A life spent longing for greatness could not be reconciled with anonymity in a cubicle. So he knew he’d have to choose something that let people see his face, learn his name, remember and thank him. For that reason alone—for his desire to be seen and known and for once in his life _appreciated_ , and the excellence it would have driven him to—he would have made a good nurse.

Human compassion, though—that was Davey’s real strength. He hadn’t been lying to himself or even settling down when he chose nursing. He would have been incredible. He made others feel comfortable and secure just by being near them; he had a knack for saying the right thing. Whether he knew someone well or not at all, he had a way of implicitly _understanding_ : of knowing when to leave and when to stay, or knowing when to speak and when to listen. And that was what was hardest about the letter from the advisory board—not losing his scholarship, not leaving his school and his friends, not being forced to finish his degree at a community college or not at all. No, the worst, most painful part of the letter was that, born artist or not, Davey knew he would have made a truly excellent nurse.

A tear splattered onto the open pages of Davey’s chem book, and he was startled to realize he was crying. For all that his abdication from Jade was meant to be about taking himself back, a reclamation, he felt like he was losing something.

“You’re being stupid,” he muttered to himself, not caring so much about being crazy, caring only about not crying over—over what? Over finally being able to follow his dreams, his real dreams, and be the person he’d never dared to be?

No. Over having no choice. It wasn’t freedom, not like this. It wasn’t even his decision. It was—he was trapped. It was a trap. Whether it put him where he wanted to be or not, it was a result of his failure, a result of him having _no other options_. And that scared the shit out of him.

Davey was crying in earnest now, tears splashing freely onto the pages of his textbook. He’d fucked up—he’d really fucked up. And now, no matter what happened, his life was going to be a result of having fucked up. Davey couldn’t control himself; he scrubbed at his wet face with the back of his hand, but the tears only came harder. The farther he was from Jade, the more difficult it was for him to imagine that majoring in creative writing was a good thing, was a doable thing, was a thing he even wanted. God _damn_ it! The glamour had faded, dried up and peeled off. He wasn’t convinced. He didn’t believe it.

He didn’t know how he was going to do this, alone.

 

 

How do you feel about the name Jacob, she’d asked him, sweet canned peaches voice fluttering like a trapped bird: with the worry, with the fear.

The name Jacob. As if that were enough, a name, to make the hard little mound of tissue and cells real to him, to make it tangible—and all this time, all he could think, the only thing, is how like a virus it was, in its early stage of infection, duplicating wildly, splitting into more and more virions, spinning and spinning and spreading like a top.

Like a bird, like a top, like a like a like a. Nothing was real, nothing was what it was; everything was like another thing, everything became another thing, everything was something else. Nothing was real. Nothing was his. Nothing lasted. Nothing stayed.

But this creature—this, this _thing_ —it would last. It would stay. That’s what they told him; that’s what years and years of scientific trials and errors told him. It would thrive; it would outlast; it would stay. It had started so small: too small to see with regular eyes, be they green or brown or blue. And then before he knew it, it was the size of a pea; it was the size of an olive; it was the size of a gerbil—before long, it would be the size of a _human being_ , and it would stay and stay and stay and live and live and live, and he’d be dead.

He’d be dead.

He was not a young man, had never been a young man, at least for several hundred years had not been a young man. He’d been old, felt old, forever; and how wonderful it was, this tall iced tea girl, this hammock in the shade, porch swing, apple pie of a girl! How wonderful it had been to be touched by her, spoken to softly, her fingers lighting like butterflies so timidly on his rough, wrinkled bark, his gnarled, mossy skin, worn from years of weather and indifference and indomitable growth.

Age was a blight, and his branches had withered. And then the girl, so beautiful and new had come—like a fresh minted penny, her eyes glowing like an electric sea, her square white teeth and her mouth like almonds—like, like, _like_ , his world a simile, everything something else, nothing what it was, because nothing _was_ , all of it so fleeting, all of it already gone—everything he was seeing (something else) an echo, a reflection. There was a greater whole, a unifying trend, a law and a license and a gravity that all else could be measured against, defined by. She would be a seventh of that measurement, he was sure; she would be three-and-a-seventh, she would be ninety-eight-and-a-seventh, but she wouldn’t be a whole. She’d be a fraction.

This thing, this tennis ball sized thing, it grew inside her, and it was growing bigger. Impatient, now; beginning to writhe. Soon it would have legs and feet to kick with, nails and teeth to claw with. Already it had a beating heart, the sound of it like waves upon a rotting pier, thrashing the pulping wood to bits, slamming and slamming, relentless. The sound of it made him nauseated; he’d never liked boats.

Boats! Boats. His wife wasn’t a boat, she was an ark. And maybe arks had been sacred, once; but back in those days, they hadn’t been arks. Not even then had they been arks. They’d been metaphors. Vessels, surely; but not the kind that would rise above forty days and nights and lifetimes of rain. Not the kind that would hold anything but a patchwork ideal of what the world should be, but wasn’t. Because even the world wasn’t the world—even the world was something else.

Jacob, she’d said. How do you feel about the name Jacob. I mean, if it’s a boy. That had baffled him, amazed him: the thing, the lump, the dividing cells, that she really believed that fetid swamp of life would ever be a boy, or a girl, or an anything. And then: that she hadn’t known. She was the host to this great parasite, was she not? Had she not been the one to ask it in the door? Had she not been the one to _lie_ to him, to _trick_ him, to _trap_ him—but then he shouldn’t be surprised at that, no no no no, because everything was another thing, really. What baffled him was that she didn’t _know_. How could she not know? It swirled with blood in her most precious of spaces, in the very core of her sole property, as she had asked it to; and she did not _know_ already if it would be Jacob or Peter or Derrick or Sam, or Sara or Heather or Bonnie or Bliss?

Poor planning, that’s what it was. Not thought through, not thought through at all. When something grew inside you, you _knew_. You knew its name, you knew its face, you saw it everywhere, in everything that wasn’t what it claimed to be but something else, _this_ thing, this thing that grew in you. Because that was what everything was; that was the something else. The thing that grew inside you was the something else. The thing that grew inside you was the everything.

He knew this. Hunter knew this and it was beyond him to understand how she did not. If he knew the name and face and _fuck_ , the dimensions of his thing, his secret sweet and growing thing, his _every_ thing, how did she not? How careless of a woman was this that he had asked to be his, to share his life, that she would find an everything and let it in, knowing nothing?

If he asked her—and his foot sunk into the pedal, the accelerator of his strange, superfluous machine, unsatisfying as ever because the car, too, like the rest, was something else—he knew what she would say. She would say in a voice like a crème horn that it was love. Love let her know nothing, love let her be strong and brave and ready to let this thing become her life. But love wasn’t even something else, he knew, because love wasn’t a thing at all. Love was a cluster of neurons, a relay of chemicals, a sequence of events staged over and over again across all of time. Love was imagination was beauty was honor was truth, and none of these were _things_ , themselves or otherwise, not really; these were only _concepts_ , which was only a way of saying _words_ , which were only mashed-up made-up sounds, masquerading as meaning. They were made up; they were human in design. They were fabricated out of thin air, nothing meaning something, in order for those speaking them to feel not so alone, in order for those speaking them to stand side-by-side, one to the other, in an elevator or on a train or in a cave at the beginning of time without feeling so far away, so alone. And thus: language. Monkeys shrieking across treetops to hear the echo from another: look, listen, hear, we can make the same sound. We are the same.

But we—they—were not. They were not and it was not and words were not real because nothing was real. If things he could touch and taste and hold were not real, how could anyone pretend that sounds, gurgling wet in the throat or stamping black across a page, were anything at all?

It was a fallacy of argument. Hunter Burgan knew this. The whole of human accomplishment, of human _existence_ —it was only a statement, made of words. And it was a fallacious one.

The statement was _we are_. The fallacy therein, of course, is that we’re not.

And then: the wall. Shrieking screaming bricks of red and brown and decay; bricks of we are and we are not, bricks of the argument stacked out across time; the wall closer and closer and looming and larger, and the wall wouldn’t hurt him in any way he wasn’t already hurt; it wouldn’t break him in any way he wasn’t already broken; because the wall wasn’t a wall. The wall was something else— _his_ something else. And he knew it. It knew him. They knew each other.

Hunter pressed his foot to the pedal to the floor, and the tires squealed and screeched and screamed, and then he was everything; he was nothing; he was

impact.

And then her voice again. Her voice here and now and sugary, like deep-fried mouth-melting sticky-chinned carnival food, and asking, what are you thinking about, dear?

And him saying, Hmm? Oh, yes. And him saying, Alexander, in fact. And him saying, It’s a good name. I’m glad we chose it.

And the gratitude in her eyes, the squeeze, the smile. And her saying, Oh, Hunter. Me too.

End Notes:

Well? What are you thinking? How does that strike you? Questions answered, questions raised? I want to hear it all! Thank you all so much for reading.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	9. Home for the Holidays

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Longevity has always been the consolation prize for passion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M NOT LATE! I SWEAR I'M NOT LATE! IT'S STILL WEDNESDAY!
> 
> I know, I know. I am a bad, bad fic provider. Just be glad it's not 11:53! Next week it might be 11:53. Just giving you a heads up, here. Lately I have been too busy to be reliable.
> 
> I digress. This chapter is a long one, so at least there's that! There's some further insight into the Burgan situation, and of course a wicked cliffhanger that's going to drive you crazy. I don't own these characters and none of the following ever occurred. Read, enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Sitting at his sister’s dining room table, rolling the same shreds of dry turkey around in his mouth over and over, Jade forgot how to swallow. No matter how many times he bit down, no matter how small he tore the pieces, the turkey in his mouth would not be subdued. His eyes began to water. There was too much turkey, never-ending; he couldn’t breathe. Finally, at last, his lungs quit; Jade began to hack and gag and, ultimately, had two options: spray everyone at the table with turkey puree or scrape it out of his mouth with a napkin. Jade chose the latter, though it was something of a personal sacrifice, and the bald-faced judgment of his table manners this led to seemed unjustified: every member of his family looked at him, and each other, and quirked disgusted brows and wrinkled disgusted lips. Jade excused himself to the kitchen gracelessly. He was hopeless at family functions.

Though, it must be said, things were going much more smoothly than usual.

They’d only been in Boston for a few hours, but that had never circumvented the screaming fights in previous years. These battles featured a rotating cast, with one consistent player: Jade Puget, yours truly. He wondered if he was especially prone to strife or if he merely caused it, and whether or not pheromones had something to do with it.

His mother, of course, was dead. She’d died almost 15 years ago. But there was still his father tottering along, table manners even worse than Jade’s at this point, and his sister Alicia, and his two brothers, and the assorted spouses and children. Alicia had two daughters: Stephanie, 14 years old and more obnoxious with each passing holiday, and Amelia, still cute enough at 6 that her truculence was endearing. Alicia also had a husband, portly and (Jade thought) exceptionally dim-witted. His youngest brother Gibson had done better for himself: his wife was tall and blond and leggy, and Jade imagined that if he liked women, she’d be the type he went for. Gibson and Lena were successful, a penthouse in New York City, and hadn’t yet found time to procreate.

Then there was his brother Smith. Smith was, by far, his favorite member of the family. Nearly a decade closer to Jade’s age than the others, Smith was a band manager. He was nomadic, fond of staying a month or so in whatever city his most recent tour ended in, picking up again when his next band went on the road. Smith had never stayed in one place long enough to get married but his son, Luke, was (Jade thought) the most likeable member of the whole clan.

Jade always felt a little surreal, sitting at dinner next to these comfortable little families, Adam’s hand resting on his knee beneath the table. It all seemed far too normal for him to bear: extended family, smiling faces, offspring, no one breathing a word about Smith’s bastard child or Jade’s penchant for dick or Dad’s dementia or any of the rest until after the first few bottles of wine. Truth be told, he always felt much more comfortable after the yelling started.

He hadn’t been in the kitchen for long before Alicia sent someone after him, reigning in the herd so she could direct some appropriately bland small talk. The Dutch doors swung shut behind his nephew and Jade was relieved it wasn’t any of the others—relieved, even, that it wasn’t Adam. Things with Adam were… well. They were what things with Adam always were. Complicated, but simple. Different, but the same. Bad, but good. Suffice to say that he was much happier to see his 22-year-old nephew than his partner of 30 years, and look no deeper.

“Aunt Alicia’s concerned you’re in here choking to death,” Luke told Jade, fiddling uncomfortable with the sleeves of his cable knit sweater. Jade got the idea that Luke was much happier in the same threadbare t-shirt and ratty jean ensembles his father had always favored. This was another thing Jade liked about Luke. Genuine people simply weren’t comfortable with dress clothes or family gatherings; that was how you could tell they were worthwhile: they didn’t like faking it. “I can see that you’re not, though, so I’d like to take this time to get into the dessert liqueur. What can I do you for?”

The efficacy with which Luke made his way to the artfully laden drink trolley told Jade his nephew had volunteered for the recon mission with ulterior motives. That was the other thing about Luke, the one that wasn’t covered up by his long sleeves like the other scars and tattoos and indelible truths: he’d grown up without a father in the heart of Los Angeles. He’d been stabbed. He’d been to rehab. He’d been to juvie. He’d tried drugs Jade hadn’t even known existed. He’d run away from home, he’d joined a gang, he’d dropped out of high school, he’d held up convenience stores for the cash and the rush and the hell of it. By the time his mother had sent him to stay with Smith, there hadn’t been much the boy hadn’t done; and while he’d wear the sweater, while he’d finished his diploma and earned a college degree, the person he’d been was still there, sneaking shots in the kitchen while his family tried desperately to swallow Alicia’s holocaust turkey.

“I’m good, thanks,” Jade said, finding himself jealous. Jealous that Luke was so very much Luke; jealous that age and disuse hadn’t tarnished and scraped away the very essence of everything that was so distinct and likeable about him. Luke didn’t use his life as an excuse, at least not as far as Jade could tell; and Jade, Jade did.

Correction: Jade _had_. The scherzo would be done well before Christmas. He was waist-deep in the thing already. And it climbed and fell with thrill and uncertainty and lust, all the renewed joys of middle age, all those that Jade had thought were lost forever; and it sounded whole, and living, and good, like the song a human heart might play, if one cared to listen to its every beat.

“You okay?” Luke asked, giving him a look of concern even as he swigged crème de menthe directly from the bottle.

“Just thinking,” Jade said quietly, because something had just occurred to him, something staggering, something awful. The man standing before him, his _nephew_ , his brother’s _child_ —he couldn’t be more than 3 years older than Davey was.

That was perhaps the first time Jade realized what deep shit he was really in. He could feel the blood draining from his face and was aware, for that first time, that at some point he had slipped into free fall. His hands shot out, grabbing the counter, bracing him against the suddenly horrific shock of it all.

What in _hell_ was he doing?

“On second thought,” Jade said in a small, strangled voice, “I think I’ll have that drink.”

 

 

It wasn’t until after dinner that Jade had his moment. He sat at the table and smiled at everyone and let the dessert liqueur burn along uneasily in his stomach, squeezing Adam’s hand at regular intervals and contributing lightly to whatever conversation drifted his way. He abstained from the seasonal fight, which erupted instead as a culmination of seven years of tension between Alicia and Lena and ended in a broken wineglass, stained dress, Alicia’s grim satisfaction and Lena’s tears. In keeping with tradition, the rest of the family excused themselves from the table at about the same time Lena went for Alicia’s throat, and dispersed to the living room. Adam, a goddamn knight, assisted Jade’s father with the journey; Gibson and Luke were recruited to haul boxes of Christmas ornaments out of the crawlspace; and Smith snuck out back for a cigarette in the softly falling snow.

Jade crept out after his brother as surreptitiously as possible. The side door swung shut behind them, and for a peaceful moment the only sounds were Lena and Alicia’s muffled shouts from the kitchen and the click of Smith’s lighter, the crackle of his cigarette’s paper becoming ash. Smith exhaled, the clove smoke strong but potable, and Jade unceremoniously said, “I met someone.”

Smith choked on his next drag, pounding a fist to his lean chest as his lungs failed. “Someone that’s not Adam?” he wheezed between coughs, eyes childishly wide.

Jade nodded glumly. After speaking to his nephew, he was finding it impossible to muster anything greater than resignation, dull resentment. Exhaustion. Maybe, he thought, this was what Adam felt all the time. Just so… tired. So beaten. It would have taken every ounce of will he had left to marshal even a smile. He didn’t know how Adam did it.

And, damn it, but that was the source of his exhaustion. Adam. Dear, sweet, great fucking Adam. Adam who was so perfect—who tried so hard. Who did everything right, everything for Jade, no matter what it cost him. It was _exhausting_ , trying to live with that kind of ceaseless love, though Jade didn’t think he’d ever be able to explain to anyone why.

“Someone not Adam,” Jade agreed wearily, barely able to lift his eyes to his brother’s aging face, wanting nothing so much as to collapse, give up, go to sleep for an hour or a year or a lifetime or two.

Smith, for his part, was taking the news better than Jade himself was. “Wow,” Smith said, savoring a long, pensive drag. And then, “But you’ve been with Adam for, what, six thousand years now?”

“It’s not easy,” Jade said. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to _want_ to do, even.”

“Well, who is he?” Smith pushed, ashing into the snow. “Is he worth it?”

“I—worth Adam?” Jade was surprised by the question, because it wasn’t one he’d thought of. He’d never considered that Davey would cost Adam—never thought for a moment that he couldn’t juggle Adam and an affair, had never considered having to choose. Because Adam was without value—that is to say, beyond value. If he had to put a price on Adam—and he couldn’t, he absolutely couldn’t—it certainly wouldn’t be Davey. It wouldn’t be a thousand Daveys. But what Davey meant to him—Davey meant youth, and passion, and creativity. Davey meant art and music and his symphony. He couldn’t very well turn away from that. Renouncing Davey was akin to settling into his own grave and calling it a nap. And if it was a choice between Adam and death, well—what breed of fool would choose his own death?

At length, Jade spoke, voice only just more audible than the falling flakes of snow. “No,” he said. “Nothing is worth Adam.”

“Then it’s easy,” Smith said, shrugging. “You didn’t meet anybody.”

But it wasn’t so simple for Jade. “He’s one of Adam’s students,” he went on, knowing that this changed things. “He… I’ve been writing again. For the first time in years. It’s because of him.”

Smith sucked at his cigarette again, revealing nothing. “People are going to get hurt,” Smith said finally, with enough vague menace to be a Hollywood mob boss. “You know that. If you’re asking me what to do, I’m telling you not to do it. It’s a bad idea. Whoever the kid is, he deserves better. And Adam—Adam certainly deserves better.”

Jade bristled a little at that. It wasn’t like his younger brother was the most savory of characters, exactly. And it wasn’t like Jade had _asked_ Smith to function as his external conscience. (Allowing for, of course, the fact that he had.)

“But this is _my_ life!” Jade protested, feeling like he had to defend himself, making the critical mistake of assuming that his position was defensible. “It’s about _me_ , and what I want, and damn it, Smith, I am not a young person! I do not have a lot of time to be stupid and selfish left.”

Smith raised an eyebrow at that, a look on his face that said he wasn’t even going to dignify that sentiment was a response, and he flicked the glowing stub of his cigarette into their sister’s neighbor’s yard. “You’re my brother, J,” Smith told him, sighing. “That means I get to tell you when you’re being a fucking douchewaffle. And that’s what you’re doing.” Jade spluttered, but Smith held up a hand. “Listen to me for a minute here. You’re right. It’s your life and it’s about you. So go ahead and throw away the one person in the world who, after thirty-odd years, is still willing to put up with your crap. Chase a kid you won’t know what to do with when you catch. I don’t care what you decide, brother; I’ll tolerate you either way, because one of these days, I may need a kidney.” Smith cracked a smile so Jade would know he was being funny, light, laughing about it. “But we’re not young anymore. We know better. So have the decency to be honest with him, all right?”

Smith slapped Jade’s shoulder, soliloquy exhausted, and opened the side door into warmth and light. “Sounds like the war’s over in there,” he said, eyebrows raised. “Time for pie.”

Smith stepped inside, holding the door for Jade, but Jade waved him away. It was, he felt, an ideal moment for standing outside in the cold and the snow, thinking difficult thoughts and making ugly decisions.

 

 

The snow made driving from Boston to Massachusetts rather more trying than Adam, doped up with turkey and pie, would have liked. A two hour drive, through Boston traffic, in the snow, in holiday traffic—it read like the recipe for the perfect suicide. Jade dozed fitfully in the passenger seat, twitching and emitting frightened little mews that woke him every twenty minutes or so. Adam turned the radio to one of those Christmas carol stations and tried to feel merry, humming along and trying to cling to the melting-snow memory of the first time he and Jade had decorated a tree. It had been years since they’d bothered with one of their own; the full extent of holiday merriment these days was the handful of chipped plastic candy canes and homemade ceramic baubles he and Jade stuck on Alicia’s tree at Thanksgiving. For Christmas Eve, as they were every year, they would be invited to make the hellish drive to NYC to celebrate with Gibson, Lena, and Jade’s ailing father. Every year, however, they politely declined. _Maybe next year_ , Jade always said regretfully into the phone. _You know how Adam’s mother can be about Christmas._

This was an unfair thing to say about Adam’s mother because it wasn’t true; Adam could count on one hand the number of Christmases he and Jade had spent in California with Adam’s family. Adam didn’t mind the slight, though. Every December he fed his own mother a line about finals to grade and curricula for the new semester to organize, and he and Jade spent the holiday together, unharried by relations or well-wishers. This had been more romantic when they were younger, of course: exchanging much-anticipated gifts by candlelight, watching _It’s A Wonderful Life_ , drinking eggnog and sleeping in on Christmas morning. Over the years they had developed a decided proclivity for treating it like any other day, with the exception of an underwhelming gift exchange and Adam’s slow decline into a bottle of red wine over the course of the evening.

Adam had an idea that this Christmas would be different, however. He couldn’t say exactly why; it was just that, between the sex and Jade’s writing, he’d felt a decidedly childlike sense of wonder descending over their world. There was delight in being together again—not a momentary one, like the comfort of touching hands or the smile on Jade’s face—but a real thrill, something special and electric once again ramping up between them. That sort of closeness was constantly in flux, of course; but Adam just had an inexplicable feeling that this time it was leading to something, perhaps a new happiness, a fresh peace.

As night began to fall down around them, Adam’s thoughts turned to darker things—to Burgan, to the wine. A quite cheerful Melanie had scheduled a post-Thanksgiving brunch for the next morning, and Jade himself had RSVPed in the affirmative. Adam had seen his department head only in passing throughout the previous week; they had exchanged pleasantries and everything had seemed quite ordinary, but Adam was quite stubbornly hung up on what had passed between them at Kittingshire’s party. The events of the evening were simply impossible for Adam to reconcile. Not for the first time, he wanted to tell Jade what had happened; but when he’d come home from the party, shaken and sleepy, Jade had been wide awake, drunk, and effusive with love. He had grilled Adam for the details of the evening, who he’d met and what they’d spoken about, and been so affectionate and happy that—that—

That what? Adam had chosen to lie to him? Confronted with a warm and receptive Jade, the partner he’d been dreaming of reclaiming for a decade, what Adam had done was lie? To say that he couldn’t bear to bring down Jade’s mood would be to lie; the Jade of old had been fond of intrigue, would have loved to go over the puzzling intricacies of the situation again and again. No, withholding the tale of Burgan and the wine was all Adam; no matter how he looked at it, this was one thing Adam simply could not blame on Jade.

So that would be another layer of duplicity atop the brunch he had to look forward to; Jade would know nothing. Any unexplained tension or behavior would be noticeable only to Adam, and would be Adam’s alone to react to. God, Adam didn’t know why he didn’t just veer wildly off the expressway here and now with that particular social engagement to look forward to.

Adam took a moment to chuckle then—the way he was thinking, the way it sounded? He was reminding himself of Jade.

 

 

Jade felt bloated, a fat fly in a spider’s web, thick and cramped with sticky guilt and gooey meaning. Hungover as he was from Thanksgiving fare and his family, he could almost dismiss the sickly premonition of doom that had settled heavy in his belly—but not quite. He remained impregnated with an awful truth, one that would never pass his lips but pressed on them nonetheless.

What had happened was this: sometime in his sleep the truth had crystallized within him. What remained, a honeyed jaundice lump of amber, was knowledge he didn’t want, a decision he’d never chosen to make: he was going to cheat on Adam. Adam, his sweet, beautiful, atrially fibrillated Adam, Adam of the broad shoulders and hard chest and steadfast disposition—the Adam that he owed everything to, the Adam he could not live without. That selfsame Adam he would betray. And he would never speak a word of it.

For all that this was a curse, a terrible thing to bear, Jade found bits of himself that were not weighed down by guilt, bits that were instead raised up and jittery with excitement. Because his immaculately conceived decision wasn’t all heartbreak and disloyalty; it was also Davey. Fiery, inspiring Davey, dripping potential, oozing songs, bleeding sonnets and bleating poems. To feel such young, full flesh beneath his fingers! To spread that life over his own wasted form, to step into that skin, to erase his rifts and wrinkles and failures and scars with the spark and passion of the young man, the youngest man, the barely grown boy with tentative hairs still sprouting on his chin.

The thing was, the terrible thing was, Jade had cheated before. He didn’t like to say it, didn’t like to think it, but years ago there had been a man. He had been desperately unhappy; it had not been the first time that his writing had simply _stopped_ , but it had been worse than he’d ever imagined such a thing could be. Jerry Finn had cancelled the remaining shows of the Thousand Year Tour bitterly, cursing his name; the new music he had sworn upon having had never flowed from his fingers as he’d always expected it to. Jade had felt hollowed out, empty, as if he had nothing left to give or be. He hadn’t been able to face Adam like that, hadn’t even been able to tell him what had happened. That same day as Jerry had called to cancel the tour, Jade had flown to Cincinnati as if he still had a concert to conduct, simply so he didn’t have to tell Adam about it. He intended to slink into his hotel room and get horribly drunk from the minibar and order Pay-Per-View porn, knowing that Jerry had already paid for the room, knowing that his entire life had ended. He had briefly entertained the idea of hanging himself in that room, or perhaps bleeding out in the bathtub, far away from home in a friendless city. In the end, he had been too vain for this: Jade Puget loved himself (and hated himself) far too deeply to ever take his own life. Instead, he had stumbled down to the hotel bar, met a man whose name he never learned, and spent a torrid, frantic night simply _fucking_.

While it was easily one of the top three cruelest things he’d ever done to Adam, the act had made Jade feel better. Like a human again—like a person who, however directionless, however adrift, still nonetheless served a purpose, or _could_. The stranger at the hotel bar had a use for him; and Adam, whose anger would be tremendous if he ever learned the truth, likewise must care deeply for him, for why else would he need to obscure the truth?

Yes: his most horrible act of betrayal had been validating, had given him the strength to carry on for another ten years. And what that man had given him was something Adam never could have. He had seen Jade through new eyes, eyes who had never seen and could not picture another Jade, eyes that had only beheld the aged and broken failed composer, eyes unclouded by love or long friendship. And he had wanted Jade anyway.

Jade had flown home the next day and told Adam the truth. Or at least, a version of it: Jade had flown to Cincinnati, he said, only to find out from the receptionist that Jerry had left a message, cancelling the remainder of the tour. Adam had been outraged on Jade’s behalf, furious with Jerry; and Jade had kept the phone number of the man in the hotel bar, scratched on the back of Jerry’s business card, taped to the bottom of his desk drawer. He’d never needed to call either number again.

So if this man, this hotel stranger, had done so much for Jade—had given him the strength to disappoint Adam, to survive disappointing them both—well. Jade trembled to think of what Davey could do. Davey, young and inexperienced and unmarked, might well save his life.

The prospect of it was delicious, sending a tingling all through Jade. But he wasn’t without guilt. He still hung fat in the web of his own machinations, waiting to be sucked dry of blood and pulp, helpless and twitching. He looked at Adam, laying next to him, sound asleep and still, somehow, looking exhausted, and felt a swell of tenderness. Smith was right. Leaving Adam, losing Adam, was the last thing Jade ever wanted. He _loved_ Adam. Adam was his everything. Adam was his forever.

Jade stroked damp knots of coarse hair from Adam’s forehead, murmuring fond nothings into his partner’s ear. Adam came blearily to wakefulness, eyes unfocused and blinking, limbs stiff and cramped from being slept on. He looked at Jade uncomprehendingly. “You’re tired,” Jade said softly, sweetly. “Let me call Mellie and tell her we can’t make brunch. We got in so late last night—”

Adam, still at least 60% comatose, was shaking his head, sitting up and yawning. “No, no, I’ll wake up. Gimme a minute.”

The circles under his eyes were darker and heavier each day. Jade looked at him, really looked at him, and wondered how he did it. Adam looked beyond exhausted—he looked utterly spent, a bag of bones that surely was in no position to mobilize itself. Jade wondered where Adam was drawing his strength from, if it came from earth’s yellow sun or the cursed ruby of Cyttorak or some equally improbable source, because no human man could have such a look on his face, such a weariness stamped on his very bones, and still drag himself out of bed each morning of his own volition. There had to be a driving force.

Just looking at Adam, just seeing how palpable his fatigue was, made Jade feel tired. He wondered if he himself was a vampire, if Adam’s life force had been dwindling all these long years because Jade was eating it up, living with the fervor and the glory of two lifetimes, two men, while Adam had none—while Adam felt nothing but the weary, welcome decline as the earth sloped beneath his endlessly plodding feet, grateful to at last be climbing into his grave, because one could rest there.

“I’ll call Mellie,” Jade said again, minced by regret. He knew beyond question that he had done this to Adam, drained Adam, and that he would continue draining Adam—because he needed it, needed more will than his own if he was to survive. He would swallow Adam’s spark, he would bury Davey’s in his gut, he would light the world on fire and eat the flames if that was what it took, what he needed. He would consume everything and everyone and gladly suffer the regret if it meant for just one moment he could truly live—and seeing that in the bleak grey morning light, _knowing_ that about himself? Selfishness no longer seemed such a virtue. It was a terrible thing to recognize in oneself, to look in a mirror and see a world-eater. His own hunger, his own need, was at once startling and repugnant to Jade.

And Jade thought, maybe it’s a good thing I’ve found Davey. Maybe while I ruin him, Adam can sit down, catch his breath, and rest.

“Don’t,” Adam said with sudden ferocity, eyes only seconds ago so full of sleep now boring hotly into Jade. Jade felt like Adam was speaking to his thoughts, for an irrational moment or two believed that Adam saw on his face or heard in his heart what Jade had been thinking. It took him a beat to realize Adam was simply vehement about brunch. “Just—don’t, J. I’m going.”

Jade sat still on the bed, haloed by rippling sheets, for a long time after Adam stumbled into the bathroom to somehow find it in himself to go on. And while he never would have admitted it, while he never would have let anyone see, Jade felt so small and afraid and alone and ugly that he wrapped his arms around his own self, shaking with hatred, and waited for the sound of the shower to fill the room before he finally allowed himself to cry.

 

 

Though keeping his eyes open at all seemed a feat almost Sisyphean, Adam watched Burgan like a hawk through all of brunch. Melanie, noticing, flitted about the room, voice high and nervous as she led Jade in conversation. Jade, too, made an especial effort, pressing a palm to her stomach to feel the life inside it kick and churn. Burgan was on his best behavior as well—attentive to his wife and guests, smiling tolerantly while Melanie babbled on about the baby, altogether pleasant, charming and perfect and quaint as the Cleaver family. His only bare allusion to Kittingshire’s party was to raise his eyebrows and mutter, close to Adam’s ear, “The board’s scheduled a tenure meeting for the third week of December.”

Adam felt grumpy, paranoid, stretched too thin. He leaned gratefully into his chair at the table, letting the motion and chatter of the others dull into a blur around him. It was peaceful, lulling him to a distant shore, somewhere to rest and forget, and Adam’s eyelids began to droop…

Because of this, he almost missed it when Melanie clutched Jade’s upper arm and cooed, “Let me show you the crib we found for the nursery.” Chittering about antiques and estate sales, Melanie pulled a docile Jade out of the dining room, taking Adam’s safety net with her.

Alone. Alone with Burgan. Feeling it would be too surreptitious to leap up and dash after Jade’s receding back, Adam instead fidgeted with his silverware and tried to avoid Burgan’s glinting gaze and the challenge in those too-bright, too-blue eyes—those unsettled eyes, Adam noticed for the first time. Like the eyes of an animal, wild and half-mad, glittering and taking in everything in jerky, spasmodic sweeps. It seemed like a big thing, untamed eyes, un _hinged_ eyes; Adam wondered vaguely why he’d never noticed them before. Had Burgan’s spectacles clouded the cold blue ferocity? Or had he been too swept up by the whole picture-perfect presentation to look more closely?

Most likely of all, Adam reprimanded himself, he was sleep-deprived and imagining things. He sat up straighter in his chair, cleared his throat, and said, “Driving back from Boston last night was hell. I’m still a little out of it.”

“The roads bad?” Burgan asked mildly, hands flat on the table in front of him.

“Terrible,” Adam complained, feeling only tenuously safe on this neutral ground. “Didn’t get home until three in the morning. It’s wreaked havoc on my internal clock.”

“Oh, I’d imagine,” Burgan said, and Adam realized too late that he’d exhausted his entire supply of conversational fodder in one go. Work, he felt, was a loaded topic, veering all too near to questions there was no point in asking. He’d hoped his misgivings about his colleague—his _friend!_ —would fade away into nothing, but he was finding it more and more difficult to let go. It was just—it felt like a betrayal. He couldn’t say why, exactly; but the events of that night were become more and more hazy, more and more surreal. He felt that if he were to tell Jade about it, now, Jade wouldn’t even believe him—he’d say that Burgan couldn’t possibly have known, that it was all an overreaction, a misunderstanding. And then Jade would wonder why Adam had let his boss choose his gift for Kittingshire, and—well. The point was, the less real it became to everyone else, the more detached it became from reality, the harder it was for Adam to concede.

“Jade’s been writing,” Adam blurted out, because god, someone had to say something! Burgan’s eyes were on him, itching. Maybe he really was losing his mind.

“Yes, Melanie said,” Burgan said, smiling now, smiling in a wolfish way Adam couldn’t trust. “It’s just wonderful. How is the new movement?”

Adam flushed at the mention. “Well, ah,” he stumbled. The truth was, he hadn’t heard it. It was true that Jade had been notoriously stingy about letting others hear his works in progress, but last Adam had heard, the adagio was finished. He simply had never asked to hear it. He hadn’t had the time—but that wasn’t true. Surely there had been time. Maybe it was the energy that was lacking. “You know how artists are,” he finished weakly. Burgan gave a shrewd nod, showing that he understood that the ways of artists were by definition un-understandable.

And that brought them back to square one. Nothing to say. Nothing to do but stare at each other, Burgan still with that smile, Adam’s heart beginning to thunder in exactly the way his medication was meant to prevent. Adam began to consider tearing out his own hair to relieve the tension—it would certainly be a conversation piece. His knife clinked against his discarded plate loudly, drawing Burgan’s eye, and Adam dropped his hands abashedly into his lap.

“All right, then,” Burgan said kindly, and Adam recalled the safe austerity of the man, the perfect professor’s life down to the house slippers, tweed jacket, and doting wife that he had so long envied. “If you won’t ask but need to know so badly, I’ll indulge you.”

Adam sputtered some kind of protest, but Burgan held up a hand in dismissal, cutting him short. “Please,” he said. “Don’t pretend you aren’t bursting with questions over there. I’m sorry my… _gift_ made you so uncomfortable, Adam. But the truth is, I’m a happy man. I have the life I’ve always dreamed of. I have no one left to impress. Can you say the same thing?”

Adam swallowed, hard. God, but Burgan made it all sound so rational! Even as he began to dismiss his own aversion as paranoia and overreaction—exactly as he’d feared Jade would do—something about what Burgan had said nagged at him. _I’m a happy man_. Adam turned the words over in his mind, wondering why they had sounded so wrong. And what could he say? He had _everyone_ left to impress, starting with the love of his life and moving on up through the entire college faculty, not to mention the editors and publishers who had never so much as sniffed at his manuscripts or the students that cared so little for long, dry lectures on theoretical perspectives on history. No, he did not have the life he’d always dreamed of. He didn’t even have a life he’d ever wanted. Look at him—look at his house, his job, his history. Look at his Jade, a face so lined and old and bitter. He’d never imagined growing old, not really, but when he had contemplated the possibility he had never once thought it would be like this. He’d always expected to be successful, published, happy—he and Jade, both of them _happy_. Maybe that was what had rung so discordant in Burgan’s words; maybe it had nothing to do with Burgan at all. Maybe the truth was that Adam himself was a deeply unhappy man.

There was a thought. Sadness had scrawled itself over every inch of his life—his exhaustion, his deadened appetite, his short temper and willful delusions and disparagement of his students, their work, his _own_ work. When was the last time he’d gone over a draft of his book? When was the last time he’d tried to tempt a publisher into leaking his name into the academic world? When was the last time he’d enjoyed himself? Pathetically, he couldn’t even look to sex for the last point—for hadn’t he been too weary and joyless, even, for unmedicated sex? Adam felt empty, as if these thoughts, the realization of his own intense sadness were unraveling the core of him, the fine webbing of lies and woven obscurities that held him together.

“No,” Adam said at last, a little more broken than he’d ever been before. “No, I can’t.”

Burgan’s smile was a benediction. “That’s why, Adam. I count few as my friends, but you yourself are counted and held to my breast, near my heart. I had nothing to gain by giving Kittingshire that wine. All the good left in my life is—well. It’s Alexander, isn’t it? And he’ll be here soon, sooner than I like to think. But you! You are a man with inexplicable luck, a man of great intellect and insight who would make a valuable addition to our permanent faculty. And frankly I think that tenure is exactly the kind of stability you need. Your eyes tell me everything, Adam: life has not been kind to you. So I am being kind to you instead. If you let me, I can make your life into that which you have ever wanted, that which has unfathomably eluded you.”

Adam opened his mouth, and closed it again. There was a hot, choking knot in his throat—tears. He was about to cry. A fifty-year-old man on the brink of tears over a few kind words? It was embarrassing. But—they were the kindest words he’d heard in a long time. And he was so, so tired from his long trek around the sun. Was it such a bad thing to want to lay down his burdens just for a little while, to let someone else carry him for once? Wetness gathered in his eyes and he looked away, swiping a furtive hand past the traitorous, leaking orbs.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the wine sooner,” Burgan added gently, a fatherly smile on his face, a fatherly glow in his eyes—kind eyes, why had Adam ever thought otherwise?—and genuine remorse in his voice. “I thought you would refuse if you knew the truth.” He paused, noting the singled escaped tear leaking down Adam’s weathered cheek. “Have I said something to upset you?” he asked, voice rich with ingenuous concern.

“I—no,” Adam said, voice low and rough, throat damnably ragged with emotion. “It’s just that I haven’t had a friend in… in a long time.” He was surprised, upon hearing it, how true it was, how the words ached down to his very _bones_ with their reality.

Burgan smiled again, frown evaporating as if it, too, had been only so many words. Adam could see by the awkwardly stalled movement of his arm that he’d wanted to press his hand over Adam’s, but had stopped himself. “That’s not the case any longer,” he said firmly, as if that settled things, and nodded his head sharply.

Adam had only just pulled himself together, mustering the kind of kilowatt smile he hadn’t been able to power for some time now, when Jade and Melanie reentered the room. Their arms were clasped together now, pressing their bodies tight, and Adam was reminded fleetingly of a half-dreamed painting, a couple walking briskly and intimately through a park, the woman with a parasol and a hat and the man with smiling lips and distracted eyes. A Renoir, he thought, or a Degas; or what those greater men would have painted, seeing what Adam saw now.

Their words washed over him like so much as muddy water, Melanie giggling and Jade waxing grandiose, but their voices reached him, and Adam felt, however briefly, the warmth of it—the warmth of being not so alone.

 

 

Davey and Nick were sprawled listlessly on the couch in Davey’s basement, seeking the only damp, unfinished refuge available in a house overrun with Marchands & Co. The TV was on, a holiday James Bond marathon that was only so much nonsensical backing tracks to Davey’s slow decline into a coma. Holidays were just so _depressing_. His mom cooked all day, panicking and barking at everyone to get out of her way and then glaring, hurt, when no one offered to help; his dad spent the day on the couch, watching football and hiding from the velociraptor he married. Family members started arriving, aunts and uncles and their offspring squabbling and stuffing their faces, and the whole time Davey wishing dementedly to escape. This year was better: not only because Nick was here, but because of how irrationally pissed his mother was that he’d invited Nick to come and not told them until he and Nick were on the doorstep, duffel bags in hand. She’d barely said a word to him yet, and while this in itself was not especially cheering, it also meant that he hadn’t had to feign interest in learning how to baste turkeys or make stuffing or what, exactly, giblets entailed.

“So they think I’m your boyfriend, right?” Nick had asked when they’d safely absconded to the poster-papered shell of Davey’s childhood bedroom. Davey wished he’d thought of _that_ much sooner—maybe if he shoved his tongue down Nick’s throat in front of Aunt Carol and her insipid brood, he wouldn’t even be invited back for Christmas.

Two days in, the novelty of his family’s oh-so-festive aversion to perceived homoeroticism (for the first time in history, Davey had not been allowed to sleep in the same room as his guest; how his parents could possibly think he’d have sex with _Nick_ of all people both baffled and disgusted him) had well worn off. The house had slowly filled up with cousins and relations until they reached the rafters; as it was, Davey figured they had precious minutes left before the younger half of his cousins discovered their haven and overran it. Still, he was unable to savor the moments; the specific apathy and oppression of returning to parental captivity had drained him of all will to live.

It was, in retrospect, a miracle the phone rang at all. Davey’s basement rather notoriously warded off cell phone reception, quite content to remained sealed to the outside world for a thousand damp eternities. Still, when his pocket started to vibrate Davey did not hesitate. Contact from someone on the outside of the Marchand holiday circus: that kind of reprieve he hadn’t dared dream of. Even as he snatched the phone from its denim encasement Davey expected it to be Tabby, calling from Minnesota to moan about all the nice Indian boys her father had lined up for her to meet, fall in love with, and marry. This would have been a welcome diversion, and that accounted for the enthusiasm with which Davey answered the call without even glancing at the screen.

Jade’s voice, nigh unrecognizable in this new, distorted medium, shocked him half to hell. A surreptitious glance at Nick, then—quick and suspicious—and Davey was up off the couch, cloistered in the farthest corner of the basement before Jade had even finished his greeting of not ‘hello’ but ‘are you alone?’.

Breath caught in his chest, Davey knew that the right thing to do would be to throw the phone across the room and stomp it to pieces, or else hiss _no, and don’t bother calling back_ before hanging up (and then maybe stomping the phone to pieces), but his resolve had weakened considerably. Sooner or later he would have to tell his parents about the letter from the advisory board; he’d certainly hate to find out what they’d do to him if they discovered his transgression only when they got a letter saying his scholarship had been revoked. Sooner or later his whole world would fall apart, and this thing—this whatever-it-was—with Jade would be his only solace. If the whole world was going to burn, what was the point in trying to save himself? If he didn’t jump into the flame now, Davey rationalized, he’s just burn more painfully later.

“No,” Davey murmured into the phone, voice coming breathless. “But I could be.”

End Notes:

Thanks for reading.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	10. Liar's Loyalty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ladies I gentlemen, I present you with chapter ten! I debated long and hard whether to put the last scene in this chapter or the next one--I have a penchant for cliffhangers, you see--but this, I think, is a different manner of cliffhanger, and a more rewarding one. I don't own the boys and this never happened, so please read, enjoy, and tell me what you think!
> 
> This first section here was fun. I'm rather proud of it. I love it when I'm comfortable enough with a character to play around stylistically!

  
_Are you alone_ , Jade had asked; _I could be_ , replied Davey. Those two simple sentences were how Davey had come to be perched here, in his most secret of spaces. Jade had said _Then do it_ , his voice the faintest of whispers, his lips brushing against one another audibly; and then Davey had found himself upstairs, pushing out the screen of his bedroom window, clambering out onto an icy slanted patch of roof into the cold without a thought to what his body would look like mangled on his uncle’s Honda below or what Jade might hear on his end of the line should be slip, should he fall.

Well, he was thinking about it now, heart hammering ferric on his tongue, socked toes wedged into the cold, biting edge of the gutter, looking down down down and realizing how much farther it was than he’d remembered. Davey hadn’t needed or used this secret sanctuary of his for a long time—hadn’t thought of it, even, since the disastrous night of his senior prom, a lifetime ago to him now.

“Okay,” Davey said, as secure on the ledge as he’d ever be, voice trembling for a myriad of reasons, the least of which the maudlin death that threatened him, breathing moist black breath and brimstone on his goosebumped neck as it hovered. Just one word: okay. A little thing, paltry, a throwaway nonsense cluster of syllabic sound—but what else could he say? _I’m here, on a roof, the whole world unfolding and ending before me, and your words are the only anchor I have, so hold on_? Hardly suitable phrases, particularly when the anchor might not steady him at all—when the anchor might just as easily drag him down.

“When can I see you?” Jade asked them, voice rusty with yearning, and Davey knew all at once the answer: the anchor most certainly would drag him down, off the edge, into the abyss and then a great bloody nothing. Davey knew too that he’d let it. He wouldn’t fight. Because, in the end, what good was fighting? The tide didn’t fight the moon. The moth didn’t fight the flame. Each rushed lovingly to answer the call of the other, and Davey could be no different, not even if he tried.

“My train gets in Sunday night,” Davey said, feeling himself slip so tactilely that his free hand groped for slick shingles, fearing. But Davey knew fear was another useless thing, just as was fighting: the fall was inevitable, for everyone.

“Not soon enough,” came Jade’s voice, almost a growl. Davey wondered without much urgency what had happened to the formalities, the game. How had the rules all changed so quickly? Then Jade was speaking again, erasing everything. “I want you to sing for me. At a concert. The rest of the chorus will sing for money or music or livelihood. I need you there to sing for me. Can you—will you do that?”

Even the present note of uncertainty sounded scripted, sounded feigned. Jade knew what Davey’s answer was as surely as if he’d written it himself. Asking for it was only a way of fooling them both into believing Jade didn’t own him already.

Hard to think, hard to speak, hard to breathe—Davey wanted it so badly he didn’t trust himself. He suddenly didn’t feel like following the rules—the ruse. He deviated.

“I’m losing my scholarship,” Davey said, and even to the wrong person at the wrong time, it was a relief to speak the words. “My grades have dropped too low. I’ll have to leave Amherst.” Again in-urgently, utterly detached from the words passing his lips, Davey wondered: where had Jade gotten his number? Davey had certainly never given it to him.

“What time Sunday night?” Jade asked, as if he hadn’t heard. Davey felt relief; his confession was too frank, too bare, too unsolicited. The words embarrassed him as he replayed them in his mind.

“Eight, eight thirty,” Davey told him, trying to remember. He had an Amtrak schedule somewhere—he glanced about, as if it might lay beside him on the roof for just such a circumstance.

“I’ll be in the library,” Jade said. “I have to go.” As abruptly as it had begun, the conversation had ended; Davey didn’t have the time to voice a goodbye before the line went dead.

The library, then. Eight thirty Sunday night. A shudder of anticipation chased Davey’s spine and he felt the biting chill of the air as if for the first time. He let it settle over his skin and possess him. The library.  
God, he loved November.

 

 

“Who was that?” Adam asked, breath puffing the cold air. Jade hadn’t expected to be followed.

“Nobody,” Jade said. “Smith.” Jade could tell that even Adam recognized that as a lie; what a poor liar Jade had always been! That was, in the end, his fatal flaw: he couldn’t write what he didn’t feel, what he didn’t believe. Ten bleak, dreary years of bitter silence: it was all he’d written because it was all he’d felt. And here, now, he was beginning to come alive again—so naturally now was the time for Adam to follow him outside on frigid winter nights and ask for answers that were unaccredited lies.

Something had been off with Adam since they’d gotten home from brunch. It hadn’t relented in the hours, in the spaces, in between. Jade couldn’t name it, didn’t trust it—it was strange to him that after all these years Adam could be possessed by something new to him, something foreign. He didn’t like it. He waited to be challenged on his obvious lie, but though Adam had never cared for deceit nor tolerated falsehoods, it did not come.

Instead, Adam asked sadly, “Are you happy, Jade?”

Jade sensed that it was not really a question, that it was instead Adam’s way of saying ‘I am not’. But that was ridiculous—Adam was not a person who was happy or sad. He was a person who did the things he had to do, no more or less. Jade had always loved this about Adam, his ability to exist outside himself in a way Jade could not even fathom. Adam was dependable—he always did whatever was necessary, without complaint. He did it because he was Adam, and because he loved Jade. Jade knew this. What Jade did _not_ know was what it meant if this changed.

So Jade answered the question, and told the truth. He couldn’t stand to let it be anything more than a query, so refused to acknowledge even the notion that it might be more, refused to acknowledge the unspoken words he could read in Adam’s sad, bloody eyes. “Very, for an unhappy man,” he said, and was proud of it. It was a shrewd, accurate answer to what he saw as the epitome of difficult questions, and he was quite pleased to have diffused the situation with as expert a hand.

But Adam refused to be deferred—another trait Jade had never before witnessed. The Adam he knew was perpetually being deferred, or else deferring himself for the benefit of others. “Fair enough,” he said with a sigh. “Are _we_?”

Jade wondered if he was dreaming. This certainly wasn’t the Adam Carson he’d known for thirty-odd years. It had been his conception that he had seen every side and aspect of Adam that existed in that time. Something occurred to Jade then: maybe he had never seen this side of Adam before because this side of Adam was new. Maybe Jade had at last done the unimaginable—maybe he had, at last, broken the indomitable Adam Carson.

Thinking that made Jade want to cry, which he’d already done more than enough for one day. In fact, between the crying and the gal-palling and the arranging of an illicit affair, Jade felt that he had quite exhausted his range for the day and ought to be allowed to go home and go to bed without running into any of this new, awful Adam crap. Didn’t thirty years earn you the right to say ‘I don’t want to deal with this right now’? Didn’t thirty years earn you the right to say ‘I don’t want to deal with this _ever_ ’?

The fact of the matter was that Jade was not enough of a man—not enough of a _person_ , really—to face just now that he may have finally killed that bright, beautiful, untouchable part of Adam that he loved best. Though it was hard to remember after all these interminable years, once upon a time Adam had been the most beautiful thing Jade had ever seen. Not for what he’d looked like (though that had always been a factor) but for what he’d _been_. Strong and kind and thoughtful and so damn loving, so damn _precious_ , that Jade couldn’t stand it—couldn’t stand it then and couldn’t stand it now. Because yes, Jade had changed. And yes, Jade had forgotten. And, even, yes—living in such close contact with something, some _one_ , so beautiful for so long had made Jade go more than a little crazy—had blinded him to the vibrancy, the brilliance. Had made him forget that Adam had always been shining.

But Adam had never flinched. He’d never wavered. He’d gone on loving Jade, and doing what was necessary, and being too beautiful to stand for every day of Jade’s life that had mattered—every day, that is, that had had Adam in it.

If Jade had broken that—if Jade had changed that—there was no question that Jade would die. He would simply cease to be. Adam had always been the most, the _only_ , beautiful thing in the world to Jade, and Jade simply could not imagine so much as existing in any world without it, without the amazing light and radiance that had ever been his Adam.

Jade wondered how long it had been since he’d told Adam he loved him, or that he was beautiful, or that despite it all, despite his own admitted blindness to the fact, Adam was still the most perfect thing Jade had ever laid eyes on. It had been too long, that much was certain. It had been lifetimes.

Nothing was more frightening than the thought that it might be too late. That there wasn’t enough Adam left to hear it or to care it had been said.

Jade opened his mouth to say something, anything, but there were no words left in the world. It was a vacuum—it was a void. A great, gaping, anchorless, Adamless void.

“It’s all right,” Adam said, laughing in a small, angry way Jade hadn’t heard before. “You don’t have to answer that. If we were, I wouldn’t have to ask. The thing that I _really_ wonder about, I guess, is—were we ever?” Adam laughed again, a helpless sound that was almost tears. “Because I can’t remember, J. I’ve really got no idea.”

Jade would have given his left kidney—hell, both his kidneys—for a single word to say at that moment. Because nothing had ever felt so desperate, so barren, so starkly _crucial_ as this moment. But no amount of organs would have given Jade the right words, or even any words at all. There simply weren’t any.

The false, aching laugh had been replaced by a single tear on each cheek, the one of the right running crooked towards Adam’s nose, as Jade had always seen those precious few times he had witnessed Adam cry. “I’m sorry,” Adam said, voice laden with too much meaning, too much feeling, for either of them to bear. “For everything I’ve done, J, I’m sorry. I never wanted anything but to make you happy—to make _us_ happy.” Adam wiped his solitary tears with his palm and just like that, all traces of his saline digression was gone. “That you can’t even look at me—can’t answer me—it kills me. You know that.” A deep breath. Jade felt himself breaking, splintering down the middle and yet unable to scream, despite the fire, despite the agony. “I wanted so badly to be happy,” Adam said, almost too softly to be heard, and Jade stared at the ground, hard, trying desperately not to cry.

When he looked up moments later, the right words on his lips for the first time in his life, Adam was gone. “I love you,” Jade whispered into the frigid, uncaring air. His words turned into clouds of frost and drifted away, as if dreaming, to dissipate high above his reach.

 

 

 

_To Whom It May Concern:_

David Marchand is one of my finest students. The effort he puts into his classwork is exceptional, and he has never failed to attend a lecture. He takes diligent notes, regularly leads the class in insightful discussion, and has frequented my office hours throughout the semester. What makes David a truly outstanding student, however, is the skill and passion with which he writes. The papers I have received from David are among the finest I have ever had the privilege of grading, in technical skill, style, and rhetoric alike. My almost unreasonably strict adherence to rubric and MLA format have prevented me from giving David higher marks in my class, but none exceed his effort and enthusiasm.

I am certain his other professors would join me in the assertion that David is a student I hold in the highest esteem. While personal crises have caused his grades this semester to slip lower than presidential scholarship criterion, I maintain that this is an isolated event. David’s active student life and outstanding learning behaviors compel me to write on his behalf.

While his performance this term has not been in keeping with his otherwise shining academic record, I implore the student advisory board to reconsider David’s current status of academic probation on grounds of exceptional effort, impressive credentials, and history of academic excellence.

 

Yours sincerely,  
Adam Carson

 

It was almost second nature to him by now—when he wrote out checks (infrequently) or correspondence (even less frequently), his hand hesitated, torn between his own sharp J and Adam’s tall, bold A. So a tiny thing like faking a signature on an equally fake letter to the advisory board—well. It was nothing, really. In the grand scheme of things, it was hardly a blip.

Furthermore, like so little else in life, it was a sure thing. Jade knew it would work because Adam had been railing against the practice for years—a student shows up with a pathetic look and a teary story or a faculty member makes a call, and so long as the student had previously enjoyed good academic standing, probation was postponed pending a semester-long second chance.

Adam detested this process, naturally. It was too political for him. He felt like lazy students got off too easily, and in a prior life, Jade had agreed with him. Jade himself had not enjoyed the privilege of a private university and always rather liked it when those in advantageous positions were undone by the selfsame lazy entitlement of their upbringing. Adam’s logic, meanwhile, was not half as vindictive—he simply liked to see his best students rewarded and his worst penalized, because he was Adam and he knew right from wrong. Whatever. Jade had heard the speeches. Jade had _also_ , much more pertinently, been left on the creaking front porch in the cold with only his echo, bleating his love to empty air. So Adam was cordially invited to fuck himself, thanks very much.

The truth was that Jade felt responsible for Davey. He fancied himself something of a mentor, or maybe a spirit guide. It was up to him to nurture the artist in Davey, fan the fire of the young man’s talent until it consumed them both. If Davey’s grades had slipped, Jade was convinced, it was through no fault of Davey’s; it was the goal Davey had chosen, at once noble and cowardly, that was the reason for his failure. A natural artist, a _writer_ , could not be expected to flourish under the rigid scrutiny of the scientific disciplines. The only charge Davey was therefore guilty of was rather tragic misguidance.

Having failed so many time himself, Jade could not sit idly by and let Davey do the same. Perhaps an hour ago the dishonesty of his actions would have elicited a response—really, _any_ response—but after Adam’s meltdown, after whatever the hell that porch episode had been, Jade was all too happy to use Adam’s name for a cause he (unreasonably) detested, because Jade felt nothing at all.

Anyway he wanted to give Davey good news when—if—he saw him. Jade for once in his life didn’t even care if he got credit for what he had done. He would quite happily tell Davey that when Adam had heard to news he had marched off the pen the letter immediately if it meant seeing the man’s face light up in that angelic smile, the one that rounded his cheeks and crinkled his eyes—so unlike Adam’s worn smile, which was all averted gaze and curled lip. Davey had sounded so desolate when they had spoken—Jade just hoped he’d taken some of that feeling and written it down. He was no stranger to the depth permeating isolation lent to art.

Jade sealed the enveloped without hesitation or remorse, licking the flap with relish. He’d drop it off at the advising office first thing in the morning. That taken care of, he turned to his symphony, dipped his pen in shining black ink, and allowed himself to be simply… swept away.

 

 

Davey hesitated on the library steps. By his phone, the time was 8:43, late. The night’s wind bit into him, cold and unforgiving. It would be a relief to step inside, into light and warmth and Jade, if he still waited; but Davey hesitated.

He had already committed to a course of action. He’d committed to it weeks ago, not even knowing that he had. But stepping into the library and at last, at last into Jade—something about that seemed dreadfully final. When he walked inside and laid eyes on the older man, that was it for him. It would be over. Nursing and Amherst and Tabby and Nick—he’d be trading it all for a few weeks or days or hours with Jade.

He hesitated because now, staring down the barrel just seconds before it spat death in his face, it seemed like a bad trade. He wanted Jade, thought Jade might save him, believed in Jade’s belief in him—yet here, now, at the crux of all things, hesitated.

It was impossible to say how long he stood there, breathing cold air and powerless to cross the threshold. He might have stood there all night, all eternity, had the door not opened from the inside, swinging out towards him, forcing him to step back. Framed by the bright glare of light from within stood Jade.

The first time Davey had seen Jade in a doorway like this, there had been darkness behind him, the man seeming to glow. Now with a halo of light behind him, Jade looked tired and drawn and old, broken down, though no less beautiful for it. He did not emanate light today: he absorbed it, consumed it, took it all in and spat nothing back out.

This should have been much more frightening than it was. Jade looked at Davey blankly for a beat before saying, “I thought you weren’t coming.” Jade said this without any perceivable emotion. Davey didn’t know quite what to do, confronted with the flatness and the deadness of his eyes.

“Train ran late,” Davey said, wincing inwardly at how apologetic this came out sounding. “But here I am,” he added lamely. This did not make him sound any better. Where was the fire? Davey wondered. What had become of the trembling exhilaration, the gasping heart, the passion and excitement he felt owed?

Jade nodded, crisp and businesslike and distant. “Adam’s spoken to the academic board,” he said. “You should be receiving a letter shortly. Your academic probation is at an end.”

Now this, _this_ Davey had trouble believing. Secretly meeting a much older man in a committed relationship at the campus library of all places—that he had swallowed easily. The desperate romanticism of dashing to the roof and risking death to take a phone call, that had come all too naturally to him. But cranky, hard-assed Prof. Carson swooping in with a saving grace and plucking him from the brink of total desolation? That Davey struggled with. That seemed, for Davey, too much.

But he didn’t tell Jade that. What he said to Jade in a weak, wavering voice, was, “Oh my god”. What he said to Jade was, “I can’t believe he’d do that for me”. What he said to Jade was, “Thank you, thank you, thank you”.

And then he fell into Jade’s arms, into an embrace most unexpected, and pressed his blue corpse’s lips over Jade’s mummified own.

 

 

After a moment of stiffness, of surprise, of not knowing quite what to do with himself or his hands or his thoughts, Jade let go of all that and fell gracelessly into feeling. He kissed Davey back sloppily, not restraining even a whisper of the heat and need that swept over him as undeniably, as thoroughly as a tidal wave. His hands closed around Davey’s strong jaw, guiding and holding the young man in place, and his lips and tongue and teeth dove and devoured and drank, feeling Davey flow into him, feeling the strength and light and youth pour down his parched throat and bloat his dark abdomen with life. He kissed Davey on the steps of the library in the cold as if he would never stop; he kissed Davey in the strangeness and secrecy of the November night until he couldn’t help himself anymore, until their twin moans burst ragged from bloody throats and these, too, coiled together in passionate need.

There was a moment—just one moment—for which he still knew and recognized and possessed himself, a moment in which he thought so distantly that he would surely burn, would surely be swept up in the romance of the flames and emerge as only ashes; and then Davey’s lapping tongue swirled over his own, and Davey’s greedy hands fell to his hips, and Davey’s fiery thumbs dug hard into the hollows there, and Jade gave up on thinking and breathing and preserving himself; Jade jumped, Jade died, Jade _lived_.

He had no memory of how they got there but they were in a bathroom, a large marble place with graffiti-ridden stalls; Davey, small and on his toes, pressed Jade’s back into the cold stone wall, sucking Jade’s tongue into his mouth, biting lightly at his lips, cold hands fumbling with his belt. Jade knew what came next and tried to stop it, maybe, a futile spark of desperation in his world-devouring killer’s kiss, but Davey was determined, Davey was too long deferred, Davey was on his knees and Jade was moaning. The sound filled up the bathroom and Jade was a fool to have written symphonies because _this_ was music, echoing off the pipes, and surely, surely they would be heard and somehow have to explain this, this messy union, but Davey’s inexpert tongue shot hungry over the length of Jade and stole away that thought too. The feeling of his mouth, so young and wet and sloppy with its anxiety and its urgency, was almost more than Jade could bear; it was better, so much better, than—than—  
Davey’s jaw contracted, teeth first ghosting over than pressing firmly into Jade, the strength and pain of the bite shocking him, and Jade knew that Davey had come; that thought more than anything, Davey’s discomfort, wet and humiliated, pushed Jade past the brink, and he saw stars and dissolved into the universe and Davey broke away, limbs trembling, and wiped his chin with a fluttering hand and slumped onto the filthy floor, too weak to stand. Jade put himself away, barely able to do up his buttons, and helped Davey to his feet; he felt ten years younger, twenty, and knew the right words to say.

“Sing for me,” he said and his voice was hoarse, torn from his cries, a far-away imagining now in this real world, this true world of marvel and granite and Davey’s small, shuddering, sweaty hand enveloped his. “In Boston. At the concert. You should be there, up on that stage, singing.” Jade’s big hand stroked Davey’s hair, his cheek, his jaw, clumsy in its adoration.

Davey, robbed even of words, only nodded, eyes wide and dewy and lined with tears Jade did not see, hand so desperately clutched and lost in Jade’s. Jade led them wordless from the library’s bathroom, the place he could not remember entering because he had done so in another life, and did not let go of Davey’s hand even as they walked past the front desk, the scowling undergrad attendant. He held onto that tiny, fluttering, heartbeat of a hand until they were once again on the snowy front steps; and he pressed it then to his chest, so that Davey’s pulse could feel his own, and he said into Davey’s ear “Wednesday, Adam’s office hours” and released that minute bird, sent it stumbling into the next world, and the next, and the one after those first two imperfect ones; and then Davey was just another star in the night sky, a fiercely glowing speck on the horizon, and Jade licked his lips, tasting ichor, tasting gore, tasting the metallic leavings of Davey’s ferric heart, and floated home, where in a firebrand frenzy of days and hours the scherzo wrote itself.

End Notes:

At long last, all your Javey wishes are coming true! I daresay I've earned myself a review! (Should I be more nonchalant about feedback? Like 'oh yeah, hey, I don't really care if you say anything or not'? Because nothing could be further from the truth!)

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	11. Spiders

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Wednesday, lords and ladies! I myself have had a busy week, lots of packing. This chapter is on the long side, which is good, because I'm not sure if I'll have one for you next week. I'm moving on Thursday and then school starts again, and I don't see where in the whirlwind of activity I'll find time to churn out 5000 words, but if I could manage it this week there's always hope!
> 
> I think this is a really interesting chapter. I don't own these characters and the following never occurred, but I wager that you'll like it. Thank you for reading, as always, and thank you for all your kind and thoughtful support! Hope I'll get to you next week, but if that fails, see you September 1st!
> 
> (If you want to make it last and treat this like it's two chapters, the most natural break is that first paragraph that starts with 'December 7th and...' Yeah, I love you that much.)

What Hunter Burgan thought to himself was that this, all this, it was interesting. A couple kissing behind cloisters—not remarkable in itself, of course. He saw such transactions of saliva with repugnant regularity, being a teacher of monkeys, wild and humping and utterly without constraint, and not human beings, dignified and discerning. But still, this union, this metaphor, it drew his eye; and when the couple broke apart, the small one fled, eyes glittering with pain instead of elation, and it was not the tousle-haired girl he had imagined but a boy, diminutive, hardly the size of Alexander and every bit what that son might grow to do and be.

The goliath, then: Hunter trained his eyes, seeking the sight, but the big figure clung to the shadows. Hunter didn’t mind; he had all night. He trailed behind, footfalls silenced, and watched the spider’s shuffle along the wall. Streetlights flooded university boulevards with false moons, blinding light: not long before the spider fell into street-caged starlight, not long before all eight eyes and legs were apparent. What a hideous monster he had seen, disfigured and warped, venomous and still dripping from its sting; there was no need any longer to trail the thing, for he had seen its nature plainly and understood as only he was able, but there was no longer any choice in the matter. He, the shadow, the hunter, was inextricably routed to the spider’s own home. Still, Hunter knew better than to fall into its web, and leaned against a wall and waited, watching, the red hourglass on Jade Puget’s back fading into the night.

 

 

Davey curled himself around the cool enamel of the toilet, pressing his fevered forehead against it, feeling forsaken. He had vomited three times and scrubbed his skin until it shone raw; still, he felt full of bile, as if he might never be empty of evil again.

He loved Jade. Or at least, he thought he did. He’d never been in love before, but he didn’t know what else this madness could be. If there was anything all the songs and poems and movies and books were about, it was this feeling, this detestable helpless consuming impossibility, this yawning cavern of illness and delight and damnation Davey had slipped into. He clung to the edge nonetheless, hoping against hope he would vomit again and his heart would come up, cold and dead, floating in a strychnine sea of cherry-red blood, because then it would be done with. It would be over with.

Not only did he love Jade, but this night had been everything he’d wanted. _Jade_ had been everything he’d wanted and he had been allowed to worship the man at last, kneeling at his feet and giving graces. Being with Jade had been incredible, passion and fire like he hadn’t known existed, the scalding fingertips, the burning tongue. It was everything he had wanted, and he wanted it again; he did. He truly did.

Why then had he begun to cry when Jade had whispered _Wednesday_? Why then had he, ever since, been powerless to stop? It was exactly as he had imagined it. It was exactly what he’d rubbed himself raw dreaming of. The only disparity, the only difference, was Davey himself. Davey himself and the way he felt right now, screaming silently, was the solitary inequality between what he’d imagined and what he’d done. He wasn’t supposed to feel this way. He was supposed to be happy, supposed to be walking on air, floating and dancing and singing, beyond even gravity in his perfection.

The other thing he was supposed to do was help people. Davey’s body spasmed, bringing his fetal form a little tighter around itself. He was supposed to help people. Not by writing some heavy-handed pretentious prose, not by fancying himself emotional and deep—he was meant to be a comfort to the ailing, a smile in the last hours of someone’s life. He was supposed to help save people’s lives and make them comfortable, administer vaccinations and yes, collect sticky cups of geezer pee, and feel worthwhile for once in his life, feel _worth it_.

Why had Prof. Carson gone to the advisory board on his behalf? Davey had no idea. He hadn’t been to a lecture since Prof. Carson had come home to he and Jade, since Jade had bounced chirping adoration to Prof. Carson’s side, since Davey had made black pronouncements and challenged the man with every dram of his being and Prof. Carson had refused to indulge him in even an inch of his fanciful romance. His simple impassivity had forcibly reminded Davey that he was not Don Juan; he was not even Don Quixote. Davey had marched home that night sick with anger, sick with feeling like a stupid little boy, never once realizing that that was exactly what he was.

And now this? Now Prof. Carson was leaping to his aid, when Davey hadn’t even told him he was in trouble? It made Davey sick. No matter how angry he got, Prof. Carson was a genuinely good man. Why else would he vouch for Davey despite the midterm debacle, the skipped lectures, the overall dismal performance? Why else would he vouch for Davey when all Davey was trying to do was sleep with Jade?

And Jade. Jade, Jade, _Jade_. How he had wanted Jade—how he wanted Jade still. It was enough to bring tears once more to his eyes, the unhealed, weeping wounds that they were. He was trembling and he was sick and he didn’t know why, didn’t know who he was, didn’t know anything anymore.

Davey didn’t know what to do.

 

 

It was a beautiful morning, Jade thought to himself. The thought struck so truly within him that he said it out loud—“It’s a beautiful morning,” he told Adam, and Adam, greyer than ever, raised his blanching gaze and smiled. It was a weak-coffee smile, a too-early too-old smile, and it seemed out of place on Adam’s face, like a note played flat when it was meant to be sharp. The dissonance of that smile and his Adam was enough that Jade could hear it, that the morning’s beauty yellowed and began to curl, that the crisp coat of snow and the biting wind and the glow of the scherzo completed faded into nothingness, into Adam’s broken-down smile and the gloom of Jade’s betrayal.

“Are you all right?” Jade asked, though he didn’t want to ask it, fearful of Adam’s answer. He had passed 30 years avoiding every question he didn’t want answered, and it had been working just fine, until Adam went and fell apart. Falling apart was exactly what he’d done—if you looked closely, Jade noticed, you could see Adam’s seams. Now, seamed and threadbare beside him, Jade felt that he had no choice but to ask Adam to say all the things he had never in 30 years wanted to hear; felt that at least if he asked them, it would be less painful for them both when they geysered out of Adam anyway, swirling silver and deadly through the air like so many razor blades, so many perfectly balanced knives.

“Of course,” Adam said, again with that smile, setting his mug down on the table more than half-full. Adam got to his feet slowly, stiffly, knees knocking against the tabletop and jolting its contents. None of this was right. “Sorry,” Adam said, wincing, while Jade steadied his own sloshing cup.

“It’s fine,” Jade said sunnily, and this was wrong too, this was not how they were supposed to act or be. For one thing, Adam did not suffer from stiff joints and labored movement—or if he did, he did so quietly, in secret, so Jade would not think him weak. For another, Adam never left coffee in his mug; he was a two-cup man, had indulged in this ritual every morning, in spite of what the doctors warned about his heart. Two cups of coffee, and a scrap of toast: that had been Adam’s breakfast for unnamed years, now. Just looking at the dark, unsweetened liquid stagnating in Adam’s cup alarmed Jade, unsettled him. Last but not least, it wasn’t Adam’s job to bump the table and spill coffee so that Jade could forgive him. Jade didn’t forgive anyone; that was one of his deciding characteristics. No, it was Jade who made scenes during breakfast, Adam who was tolerant and patient and sweet, Adam who forgave without thought, without question. What Jade did, what Jade had always done, was persecute even the tiniest mistake.

There were roles they were meant to fill, scripts to read and parts to play. Adam won Best Supporting Actor every time for his kindness and his bottomless love. Jade, meanwhile, played the lead: dark and angry and steeped in his own bitter failure, furious and cruel and sapping every scruple of Adam’s quiet strength. If they weren’t these people anymore, if they couldn’t fill those predetermined shoes, Jade wasn’t quite sure what space he was allowed to fill, who he should and how he should be. Deviating from the script they’d followed for so long ought to be refreshing, but Jade found himself stymied, perplexed.

“See you this evening,” Adam said, stooping to pick up his bag. Even this seemed more of an effort than usual. Jade wondered where his _I love you_ was, what had happened to his stubble-scratching kiss on the cheek. He also wondered why Adam had not asked to hear the new completed scherzo, or why he hadn’t offered to play it; he wondered if Adam would hear the truth of it all in the music, or if he would be willfully blind to that too.

The strange thing was, Jade didn’t feel guilty yet. The first time he’d cheated on Adam, of course, he hadn’t felt guilty—he’d felt self-righteous and justified, as if it were something he was unable to function without and therefore something he was entitled to. Just one transgression, he had told himself—just one transgression in a long life of loyalty. Certainly most wives and husbands would be querulously impressed if he were to say that, in twenty years, he had only cheated once.

But this thing with Davey—it seemed so premeditated, so unforgivable. It wasn’t that it had happened once, or that it would happen again: it was that at least some part of Jade had been planning it, wanting it, all along, from the moment he stormed into the kitchen, made angry by the sound of a stranger’s laugh, and laid eyes on Davey. That seemed like more of a betrayal than anything. On the surface the thing looked irresistible, like passion and art, undeniable; but from the inside Jade saw clearly that he had calculated his seduction, cold and unfeeling, from the start. Maybe from before he’d ever met Davey—maybe from the day he’d met Adam. Maybe the very first time he’d laid eyes on Adam he had thought, in some distant corner of himself, _Someday I will break this man’s heart_.

And Jade ought to have felt terrible about that. It wasn’t just your mundane betrayal: it was a grand orchestrated scheme, one final movement that would decimate them all, their destruction penned deliberately into the very notes. But all he could do, almost powerless but to sit and watch the apocalypse unfold, was applaud himself for the mastery with which the web was woven. If they were the final notes he’d ever write, laden as they were with explosives and agony, then he could do nothing but marvel at their beauty, their finesse, his own great skill, realized at last. Because that was what it was to him: intricate and crippling, deadly and divine, his greatest work, his last, was a masterpiece.

 

 

Davey didn’t bother resolving not to show up. He’d wanted to, of course; sobbing snot and vomit, he’d wanted to. He’d wanted to pledge _never again, never again_ , Poe’s demented raven, wanted to tell Nick and Tabby the whole shameful, sordid story so they’d lock him in; but Davey knew that these measures, these precautions, would only humiliate him. He himself didn’t even want to see the lies and cheats and lows he’d slither to to break his own word and flee to Jade’s side. Might as well, Davey figured, simplify things: skip the whole ordeal where, tear-faced and terrorized, he vowed to never sink so low again. Better to just accept his trajectory and go to Jade unhindered by what sorry measures he might conjure to keep himself away. Whether he wanted to go or not, Davey was this time smart enough to realize, was not up to him. He would follow Jade into hell if that’s what it took. He’d burn down buildings, raze the world, if that’s what Jade had wanted. He might try not to; he might struggle against it, he might fight. But in the end he would do exactly was the older man bade him to. Free will was an illusion, a trap. There was always someone older, someone wiser, someone large and beautiful and godlike, pulling the strings. In Davey’s case, it was Jade.

Wednesday came unhindered, filling Davey’s bones with dread. He trudged to his classes and sat in them, not so foolish as to scoff at his second chance, but he didn’t have the energy or the resolve to listen or take notes. He merely sat, letting the sounds and spaces pass over him, feeling each second scrape its jagged thorax across his skin as it staggered past, barbed insect’s legs skittering. And just as the day had brought him morning out of night, it brought him too to Jade, delivering him on the icy doorstep of 491 Sycamore. If Davey were a dreamer, he did not wake until it was too late; he did not so much as stir until he was standing on that step, doorbell ringing, and even then all he could do was let out a whimper.

And then Jade was there, at the door, and Davey was in his arms, and it was ecstasy.

Hours turned to days turned to weeks, and Davey couldn’t stop it. He struggled to focus in his classes, struggled to write in his off hours, struggled to listen as Tabby went over and over the basic skeletons of the calculus he was meant to have been learning all semester. Throughout it all his feet tripped along dazedly, bringing him again and again to Jade’s door, Jade’s body, Jade’s starving lips and eyes, and those were the only moments when he was alive—sweaty and struggling, surging towards release and bidding desperately for freedom, fighting and fighting and bursting and collapsing, spent, breath ragged, lips torn, and so, so full, so, so happy, if only for a moment or two.

The first time Jade led him to his bedroom, Davey balked. The bed was plain, made hastily, with an unremarkable bedspread and some normal amount of pillows, the bedside tables sprawled with the debris of life. Even as Jade sunk catlike into the mattress and beckoned to him, Davey had been riveted in the doorway, eyes anchored to the folded reading glasses on a nightstand, the ones he’d seen Prof. Carson don in class. Next to the worn silver frames was an orange prescription bottle, an empty glass, a dog-eared paperback book. A box of Kleenex—a lamp. Clearly it was the space in which an unsuspecting man lived and worked and breathed, never thinking that his partner invited others in, welcomed them to his carelessly placed medications, to his worn intimacy. Davey was unable to enter the room, that first time; he had stared at Prof. Carson’s effects in horror until Jade, gentle, guided him instead to the kitchen, fed him sandwiches and tea, made mild conversation and sent him on his way with little more than an insistent kiss at the front door. Davey disliked being kissed by Jade so publicly; while half of him crowed to be seen on the arm of this man, this trophy, the other felt only eyes on him, hearing hisses of derision, the slow release of secrets seeping free.

The second time Jade led him to his bedroom, having exhausted the couch of its possibilities and limited romance, Davey had steeled himself, looked away from that oblivious nightstand, and done the kind of things to Jade he’d only ever dreamed of. The glasses, folded and bereft of eyes, cast nothing but reflections. It was easy to convince himself that they saw nothing, but only a fool would believe that, really.

And so time passed. Somehow his grades improved marginally, perhaps only due to the tepid frequency with which Jade inquired into them. Tabby’s tireless efforts to tutor him showed piecemeal progress, and at the last possible moment, he dropped his anatomy class. Jade would read over his papers after sex, seeing each draft before Davey handed it in to his partner, an intimate preimagining. Davey wondered if it ever seemed to Prof. Carson that he had read it before, that there was a déjà vu to Davey’s work as it had existed in the same space he did long before he had occasion to read it. Davey changed his classes for the next semester to include more writing, less science, and slowly, it looked like time would correct his mistakes, like lifetimes would uncoil and stretch across the afternoons he spent with Jade, like sooner or later he’d see one shining, pluck it, and make things right.

The only problem was he couldn’t write anymore. Or, rather, he could, but it all seemed a sickly echo, repetitive and shallow, not something you could call art. He did not show this work to Jade, because it was about him; every character was Jade, every word described him, every sentence seemed shaped for his lined lips. He felt emptied out, save for the voice of Jade inside him; he felt drained, as if he were but a flickering shadow until the eyes on him were Jade’s. When he was awake, he thought of Jade. When he slept, he dreamed of Jade. He only felt real, fully in any one world, when he was _with_ Jade. Davey could see it happening to himself—he was growing crabbed, colorless, drab. He was only a chunk of glass, useless except to refract Jade’s light; and he had not been that, before.

But maybe he simply hadn’t understood, before. Maybe this was what love really was. Giving yourself to someone else—giving yourself up for someone else. They were the same thing, really. It was only a battle of semantics. He had given himself to Jade: and if this was what Jade wanted to do with him, this was what would be done.

 

 

December 7th, and Adam suspected nothing. Finals week had just begun and, as if that were not stressful enough, the pain had started again—the fluttering, the fidgeting of an awkwardly beating heart. Adam had done this before. It went like this: he’d go to a cardiologist, be admitted to the ER, be threatened with surgery, and have his heard rest by a chemical drip. He’d go home armed with syringes of Coumadin (a blood thinner), enough beta blockers to keep him drowsy for months at a time, and a hospital bill that was nauseating to look at. This whole song and dance would take 3 or 4 days—that is, if the previous two episodes and subsequent hospital stays were any indication. Adam knew that these little stints were only dress rehearsals—dry runs for the real thing, the big thing, the heart attack. It was inevitable for a man like him, one with great bites taken out of his heart, teeth marks still trickling blood; and while there was comfort in knowing how you would die, it was less than you’d think.

Whatever they were, these little fluttery, panicked visits to the ER and the IV, the fact was that Adam simply didn’t have time for a 72 hour excursion to the hospital just now. So he grimaced, and occasionally clutched feebly at his breast with clawed, weak fingers, and tried to cut down on his exertion, and bore it. If it didn’t correct itself, he decided, he could admit himself after finals, just in time to ruin Christmas. There was nothing to be done for it until then, and there was no point in worrying anyone, so he lied to Jade that he was simply exhausted from all his long hours at work, and stayed in his office late into the night, napping fitfully. He had even caught himself dozing during a test period yesterday; weak tea was not sufficient, apparently, to keep his eyes open for more than forty minutes at a time, but indulging his coffee habit with his heart rabbiting like this was a signed, notarized death warrant.

When Jade walked into the library at the back of the house that evening, the first thing he said was, “Adam, are you wearing a parka?”

Now, Adam had a choice. He could play doddering old fool, claim he’d simply forgotten to take it off, or come across as frail and ailing, and admit that he was colder than his waiting grave, which was sure to make Jade suspicious and—worse—concerned.

The truth was, Adam wasn’t sure when the pain, the flutter, had started this time. A day or two after Thanksgiving, he thought, but it was impossible to say. God, it was just so hard to breathe. He knew he ought to keep better track of his cardiac digressions, but it never was a sudden thing. It came over him slowly, the pain, until one morning he noticed he was gasping for air with a stitch in his side and a knife in his chest and wondered when it had gotten so out of hand. Anyway chest pain was not so uncommon for him, and he’d assumed it would pass in a few hours, at most a few days, as per usual. By the time his heart had made it apparent it wasn’t resetting itself anytime soon, well, Adam simply hadn’t had time to go through the proper channels. He was certain the thing would beat for another week yet. There was no need to worry. In this manner he had well enough convinced himself that he was perfectly fine; convincing Jade, however, would be another story. No, it was best to keep it to himself.

“So damn fashionable I didn’t want to take it off,” Adam said at length, trying to smile as he did it, hoping he seemed lighthearted. Jade eyed him with distaste, one brow arching delicately. Adam noticed suddenly how neatly shaped it was, the way Jade had kept his eyebrows when they were much younger men. If he wasn’t mistaken, Jade smelled different too—a hint of cologne, a gift given and forgotten years of birthdays ago, so that it had a cloying kind of familiarity to Adam’s nose.

Adam’s stomach sank. There was really only one thing a good-smelling, immaculately groomed Jade could mean. Adam had managed to fend him off since the trouble had started in his chest, but he had been too weary today to nap at his desk, too cold to while away the hours in his drafty office, watching his work pile up. But it seemed the hour of reckoning drew near—and how could he tell Jade that his heart thundered and his lungs failed and his head swam, that his skin froze and his hands seized and his body was too weak to confront a flight of stairs, without telling Jade about the lance of fire through his breast? And how to say ‘I’m just too tired’ without Jade hearing ‘I just don’t want you’?

But Jade curled docilely on the couch, tucking his feet up under him and resting his cheek on Adam’s wool-clad shoulder, and he said, “There’s something I should have told you”, and Adam stopped breathing altogether.

 

 

December 7th and Jade was bursting with truths untold—bursting with the purest, most golden joy he could remember. For even while Adam faded and aged before his eyes, Davey thrashed and bucked with such passion and life it was as if he saved it, bottling vivacity, to use only on Jade. The fire of this drink, this nectar, this youth—it changed things. Jade refined the scherzo, distilling it to the highest form of purity; he drank deeply and ate fully of life. He loved himself again, watching the fat on him tighten, tauten, turning to something hard and smooth and close to the bone, an animal sleekness, lean muscle. And it seemed to him that the great rifts and canyons around his mouth and eyes and all his hide were smoothing, filling in, the bags under his eyes shrinking. Certainly he had more energy, more appetite, slept less and relished the nighttime hours—and, though he had to be imagining it, when he ran his hands through his hair it felt thicker, stronger. The well-traveled diameter of his bald patch seemed, to idle fingers, reduced; and certainly his pants fit more loosely, hanging from his always pronounced hips. Certainly his lips were pinker, fuller, his eyes brighter, than they’d been in years.

His skin, fine and freckled, burned as fire against Adam’s cold flesh. He wondered if his was the vitality that his partner had lost, but was unable, now, to regret draining Adam’s spark that he might live. It was also true that the draught of Davey, strong-jawed and lissome, might have restored him. He was certain that he blazed now, quietly but fierce with glory, and was mindful to be gentle with Davey, to dote upon him, to only nibble at his heart, taking small bites even when famished, chewing the stringy meat slowly, blood on his chin. He savored the muscle and its taste of life and iron, knowing that if he gorged himself and ate his fill there would be nothing left, not even a whimper. One tremendous meal: he’d eat to bursting, and it would satisfy, but it would not sustain. Adam, clinging weakly to his last, guttering spark, had taught Jade this—had taught Jade that it was not enough to be a man, that the only way to live was to be a glutton, to be a god.

He was far too happy to be honest with Adam, about Davey. He knew he had been careless a time or two, threading his arms around Davey’s waist and kissing him goodbye deeply on the front steps, enjoying the tinkle of the boy’s crystalline laugh in public places, not stopping Davey’s hand from wandering up his leg under restaurant tables, exchanging lingering kisses over coffee—but for all this he did not want Adam to know. Still, Jade sometimes walked Davey to class, hands clasped between them, as far the Armoury where Adam had his office, and he knew for a fact they had fucked more than once in front of the windows, the prints of Davey’s perfect ass cheeks still visible when they fogged. They fucked in Adam’s bed, on Adam’s sheets and pillows; and the more and more he did not get caught, the more openly, the more blatantly, he wished to conduct his affair—because Jade, never a man of moderation, had fallen into one of youth’s oldest traps. He had begun to imagine that he was invincible.

Despite this, he knew that he loved Adam. For all the fresh, strong voice inside him screamed _fuck love, give me fire_ , Jade remembered that Adam had once seemed too precious to cast aside. There was no need to hurt Adam any further, not if Jade had fucked Davey in the shower, on the kitchen table, on the kitchen floor, on nearly every surface in their home without Adam ever noticing. There was no reason, really, for Adam ever to know. So he wouldn’t be telling Adam that particular truth anytime soon. Jade imagined briefly whispering the words over Adam’s freshly turned grave, tomb dirt in his mouth and grief a choking weight upon his heart— _There was someone else, Adam. You were the prison I wept away my youth in. Even now you dare not blame me for needing something more._ But it was foolish to forget, to even for a second envision—no matter how old he might look to Jade’s new eyes, Adam would not be dying for many years yet, and Jade could not expect to stand over a grave with castigating lips, for he would surely already be in the earth beside it.

Adam’s eyes, slimy and lifeless, swung like pendulums beneath grey lids. How old he seemed! While weeks ago Adam had been younger by two years and, handsome, looked younger by ten, to Jade today Adam seemed 100 at least, on death’s doorstep. Jade felt fifteen again, lighthearted and happy and baffled by the idea that he might ever age, or fail, or die.

Last night he had made three phone calls while Adam, so obliging, had been away. The first had been to the answering machine of Jerry Finn, on which he had played a sample of his (of Davey’s) third movement, one of the best bits, tauntingly sweeping but a few notes short of full, of crescendo—like those very best moments of sex, those just before orgasm, that whole-body whisper of _soclosesoclosesoclose_ that was unbearable ecstasy.

Playing it, thinking that, had made him half-hard; he’d called Davey, woken him, and they’d talked each other off, the boy’s honey-rich voice choked and ragged with need, his bruising lips scraping together, his breath catching, the sweet, sticky cry of his release.

Deeply satisfied, Jade had turned Jerry’s faded card over in his large hands, smoothing the pad of his thumb over the embossed lettering on the front, the swollen pen indents on the back. And so, curious without reason, Jade had allowed his finger to dial (and how remarkable it seemed, in the dark, that he could make out clearly the tiny buttons that had once chagrined him so!) a number he’d never thought he’d need.

The phone rang once, twice, a third time. And then a voice, thick with sleep, a mumbled greeting.

“Do you remember me?” Jade had asked in a whisper, barely breathing. “The man from Cincinnati.”

A stillness—a pause—a breath. “Who is that, Robert?” a tinny female voice asked in the background, an oblivious wife nestled in a traitor’s bed.

A great rustling—a man leaving bed. His voice muted and Jade imagining he could hear a heartbeat where the phone was pressed against a bearlike chest, thick with curling gold hairs, maybe grey now. The word ‘work’, just audible, and another silence.

At last the man said, voice soft and breathless, “Yes. I remember.”

Jade was caught up now in his newfound recklessness, the kind that drove him to the same old acts of desperation but without all the regret. “Was that your wife?”

The man hesitated. Jade heard it. “Yes. Marie,” he said. Jade wondered what he was wearing, imagined a bare chest and loose boxers, and began to touch himself again, this time with slow deliberation.

“Does she know, Robert?” he asked, almost growling, enjoying the taste of the stranger’s name on his tongue, an advantage. “Does she know what you do when you travel alone?”

“No,” Robert said, voice a pleading mew, breath coming harder. Jade’s cock stiffened in his hand, imagining Robert’s did the same.

“Bobby,” Jade said, panting a little as he stroked himself. “When you were a child, I bet your mother called you Bobby.”

“She did,” Robert whispered, weak and pathetic and horny and frightened. Jade’s strokes grew faster.

“Are you touching yourself, Bobby?” Jade asked, voice louder and braver. “Are you thinking of me?” And even as Robert whimpered _yes_ , Jade knew it wouldn’t be enough to bring him, knew he needed more. “I’m thinking about your mouth on my dick, Bobby,” Jade went on, feeling cruel and causeless and alive and on top of the world. Robert moaned, the sound of a prey animal in fear, and Jade’s erection wilted. Mundane, banal phone sex would clearly not cut it twice in one night. He needed something… different.

“How long have you been married?” he changed tack abruptly.

“Thir-thirteen years,” Robert answered, hot and confused at once, too far into jerking off to stop now, no matter what Jade asked him, too obsequious to even consider not answering, too cowardly to ask any questions of his own.

“Shame on you, Bobby,” Jade admonished. “You were practically a newlywed when you put your cock inside me.” Robert whined, high and loud, back on familiar ground. Now there was an idea—Jade’s fist pumping faster—if he made enough noise, the wife would come find him, boxers jerked just below his ass, pulling furiously at himself, on the phone with a stranger. Yes. Jade’s erection was back. He liked that idea. “What’s it like, with Marie? Is it good?” he asked next.

“Not as good as with you,” Robert groaned, mistakenly thinking this was what Jade wanted to hear.

“When was the last time she let you near her cunt?” Jade asked, sneering and hard but no closer to release. He knew with sudden clarity that he wouldn’t be able to finish, not ‘til Marie walked in.

“Two or three m-months,” Robert gasped, voice louder now—he was close. Jade would have to hurry.

“It makes you hate yourself, Bobby, doesn’t it?” Jade asked, _soclosesoclosesoclose_. “I hate you too. You big fucking coward. You big fucking pussy-loving cocksucker!”

If Jade wasn’t wrong—and he highly doubted he was—Robert was crying now. Blubbering. And still pulling at himself like a monkey, like an ape, as if compelled, unable to stop.

“What are you thinking right now, Bobby? What the fuck is in your pathetic little brain?” This brazenly abusive side of himself—it wasn’t new, exactly, but it had never been like this before, either. So angry—he wondered why he was so angry. His dick felt chafed raw in his hand. It had to be soon. It had to be soon, or—

“You, okay?” Robert was angry too now, almost yelling. Yes—yes. “Fucking your tight ass ‘til neither of us can walk! Fuck you, man! Fucking fuck you!”

Another voice—a not-quite-new voice, a high and panicked voice. “Robert?” Rising in horror. “Robert, what are you—” And then a grunt, familiar even across all these years, and the woman’s scream, and Robert saying, “Baby, baby no” and Jade coming at last, again, scalding, thinking about Robert’s children, cowering in their beds. He listened for a while, riding out his orgasm with gentle fingers, watching his cum cool on the carpet and enjoying their sobs and shouts, not hanging up until, satisfied, he heard Robert crying _Baby, I swear, I don’t even know his name_.

Here, in the present, Jade was surprised to hear Adam prompt, “What is it?” Maybe he’d fuck Adam tonight, Jade thought disinterestedly. Remembering Robert’s hoarse voice screaming _fuck you_ —it had almost been worth it, dialing that number. But for all that it had fed his insatiable appetite with something he hadn’t known he’d hungered for, it had ruined the night in Cincinnati. Knowing now what kind of man Robert was, taking his strength that night no longer seemed special. Now it didn’t feel so necessary—in this new light, it looked uncomfortable, almost like betrayal.

Jade wondered, not for the first time, what was happening to him. His new inclinations—his new appetites—he was someone he didn’t recognize. If he continued at this rate, he wondered, would he simply burn himself up? And maybe he wanted to burn up. Maybe he hated himself. Maybe that was why he had loved Robert’s screams. Maybe that was why even now he wanted to hear them again.

Adam squeezed his hand, bringing him back to reality, and the effort seemed to cost him: Adam looked greyer than ever. Jade didn’t remember Adam ever seeming so old. “I called Jerry,” Jade said, a fact that would once have made Adam furious—Adam who had never heard the true version of the story, Adam who blamed Jerry for the whole thing, maybe even Jade’s subsequent ten years of silence.

Adam who barely reacted to this once earth-shattering news. “Really?” he asked, but probably only to seem like he was contributing.

Jade sighed and snuggled closer to Adam’s inert form, finding in it a comfort he did not deserve. “There’s going to be a concert in thirteen days. In Boston. For my new material. I’ve written new material,” he added, an afterthought, in case Adam didn’t know. It seemed like Adam didn’t know.

For the first time in at least a week, Jade saw a genuine _anything_ cross Adam’s face. “J!” he cried, sitting up and grinning and looking ridiculous in his parka, fumbling for Jade’s hands with icy gargoyle claws. “That’s incredible! What orchestra did you get?”

They passed what remained of the evening this way, Adam joyfully asking all the right questions, the ones only Adam knew to ask, and Jade loved him then, fiercely. They talked for an hour, maybe more, before Jade realized that Adam was waning, eyes drifting in and out of focus, looking spent. Jade guided him to their bedroom defiled, holding hands with an elderly tenderness, and crawled under the sheets beside him, pressing his body close. Jade stayed that way, lying very still and watching his breath ruffle Adam’s eyelashes, lending Adam his warmth. After all these years of stealing it, it felt like the least he could do. Jade laid that way for a long time, listening to Adam’s irregular heartbeat, his irregular breathing, until he was sure the man was asleep. Only then did he uncoil himself carefully, rising gingerly from the mattress, and headed to his study to hate himself, to weep.

End Notes:

Like I said, interesting chapter. We're seeing some early metaphors come to fruition and, I think, a play on the title that may have come as a surprise. Jade's also getting a lot darker, a lot more hurt. And let's not forget that fractured paragraph from Burgan's head... Thank you for reading and thank you in advance for letting me know what you think! See you in 2 weeks for even more awesomeness!

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	12. Derivations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lords and ladies, I return. None of the following ever transpired and my entirely fictional account stars characters who are quite beyond my ownership. That said, I hope you enjoy the following.

They were together, Davey and Jade lying entwined, almost as one being, Davey’s slim, pale foot rubbing languidly up and down Jade’s leg, and the older man was speaking animatedly, the chin of the younger buried in his neck, Davey’s skin humming with Jade’s vibrations.

They were talking about art. Art, the abstract, and the grand human greatness—the only possible meaning, Jade was saying, to life, to human existence. “Think about it,” Jade was imploring, tracing out the pillars of his argument in the air. “What can we possibly accomplish? We’re born, right? We eat and sleep and fuck and die, and that’s it, that’s the total sum of human existence, and no one of us can ever make or do or mean anything real. There is no lasting change. There is no advancement. The only accomplishment of man—the _only_ lasting accomplishment—is his art. We document human history, human progress with art all the way back to _cave paintings_. Everything else is surpassed, replaced, could be done better and more efficiently by a machine. The only things that stand out in all of human history—it’s not our science or our technology or any of those inevitable, yes, _inevitable_ derivations. It’s paint on walls and novels and poems and music. It’s sound and feeling and thought that gets inside of you and never leaves. When all is said and done, when our race is annihilated and the sun immolates this planet, what will be left of the collective unconscious of man? Only art, Davey. Art is the only thing that lasts. It’s the meaning of life.”

For his part, Davey was not entirely spellbound by Jade’s ranting. “What do you mean, ‘inevitable derivations’?” he pressed, a smile on his swollen pink lips, nuzzling the hollow of Jade’s collarbone. “Because I don’t exactly think that, like, the iPhone is an indelible part of god’s plan or—or an evolutionary directive.”

A patronizing smile twitched Jade’s lips, and Davey loved him for it. His arrogance—it was everything Davey had loved about the face of Gustave Courbet, about the bold, unashamed challenge of painting himself looking so; more and more, Davey realized that Jade _was_ that painting, the one he’d wanted to look at every morning to be forcibly reminded of what genius and arrogance and potential really were. And while Davey could, after a few weeks of afternoons wasted in Jade’s bed, wasted on Jade’s body, recognize the fallacies of Jade’s sweeping arguments, he didn’t care to point them out. He preferred to let Jade get carried away, and be carried away as well. When there emerged hypocrisy or stubbornness or even ignorance, Davey found it endearing; Jade’s bloody-mindedness was, in spite of the man himself, adorable.

“So you’re saying that science is an accomplishment of mankind,” Jade said, voice a little flat. Davey didn’t have to look to know that Jade’s nose was wrinkled.

For the sake of the argument, for the sake of Jade’s voice continuing to fill the room in thick, dreamy clouds, Davey said, “Yes. Scientific advancement—” But he didn’t have to say more than that.

“All right then,” Jade blustered on, and Davey knew that he had played his part beautifully and allowed Jade to carry on with his dialectic. They both preferred the script. “Well, what’s the first really notable scientific theory proposed by man? The big one, the one that stuck, none of the crap that was wiped out by the Dark Ages even while enlightenment was still within living memory. Let’s say, for example, Isaac Newton. Gravity. Does that sound good?” When Davey nodded, _yes_ , Jade went on. “Do you really believe that Newton _invented_ gravity? That he came up with it? That he came up with _any_ of his theories or principles? Of course he didn’t. His great achievement—hell, Albert Einstein’s great achievement—it was just noticing what was already there. It was just naming a force that already existed and wasn’t properly understood. That’s no different than arbitrarily assigning phonemes to morphemes. Newton’s theory of gravity is no different than noticing the color of the sky, and then deciding to call that particular shade of visible light ‘blue’. And that, my dear, is science.”

“So you don’t find science or theory or invention to be impressive at all?”

“Please,” Jade scoffed. “If I was going to be impressed by people noticing and naming things that happened to exist, I’d teach children. I’d run a daycare.”

“But invention,” Davey pestered, feeling more relaxed and happy and alive than he could in any moment Jade wasn’t in. “That’s creation. Technology is creation. That’s your whole thing, right? Original creation?”

Davey was delighted to see Jade shake his head primly, looking affronted. “Invention is assessing a need and fulfilling it. Do you know who does that job, Davey? Computer programs. Tiny, insignificant, basic computer programs. When you need to get from point A to point C, it doesn’t take a genius to isolate the elements of bridge B.”

“So creation is superfluous.” Engaging in these talks like this with Jade—it was more gratifying than the sex was. “What you’re saying is that anything motivated by necessity is useless, inevitable. The only things that matter are the superfluous ones—the ones that serve no purpose—the things, in fact, that _don’t_ matter. The only reason art is meaningful is because it’s meaningless.”

That conclusion gave Jade pause. He propped himself up on one elbow, displacing Davey, who slithered onto a pillow he tried resolutely not to think of as Prof. Carson’s. Jade looked down at his companion, face fierce was scrutiny, dark eyes critical and jaw set in a firm line. Unrelenting, Davey snuggled his face into the random, ownerless pillow and beamed up at Jade happily. At length the older man said, “Well… yes. Yes, I suppose that’s exactly what I’m saying.” Jade looked a little surprised to be saying it, and gave a startled little laugh at his own words. “The meaning of life, then, is… what?”

“The meaningless,” Davey supplemented quietly, dreamily, feeling as if he might never be so happy or so full as he was here, now, in this moment.

What Jade did next proved him quite wrong: delighted at the words from Davey’s lazy lips, Jade rolled, supporting himself on extended arms above Davey; and he stared into Davey’s eyes with a kind of insistent fire, a look that Davey’s nether regions immediately responded to; and Jade kissed him slowly, delicately at first, working up slowly to a devouring kiss; and Davey drew Jade down on top of him, spry fingers snaking between them, and in that new moment he was happiest of all, until the next one.

 

 

Adam sat in the garage, car quickly cooling, and palmed his heart. It wasn’t thundering, today, so much as it was tripping gaily along, for all the word like a little girl in a fairy tale, oblivious to the jarring knife blade of each merry footfall. It was all he could do to sit there and slowly, painstakingly, inflate his lungs; even as the cold outside air began to seep into the Buick, the prospect of standing up and walking into the house was too daunting to even consider.

He wondered what Jade would say, when he made it inside—if Jade would notice the delay between the reluctant grinding of the garage door, the Buick’s final whine, and Adam’s labored steps over the threshold. Adam supposed it all depended on what Jade was doing at the time. He would almost certainly be writing, legitimately lost in his work, notes spinning like a glistening web around him, and Adam could peek into the doorway of the study and feel warmth unclench from the fire in his chest and seep into numb, clumsy limbs, just at the sight of Jade, his Jade, hard at work and so happy.

It was strange to Adam, the way Jade had been lately—not just writing, not just happy, not simply reminiscent of his young self. No, the past few weeks, Jade had seemed incredibly _present_. There was, as a rule, distance between he and Jade; an ever-widening gulf which, while not exactly a comfort, was at least, in its own way, a beautiful view—a grey, foggy expanse to gaze out over, sunlight blazing white across the smooth, clouded water on sunny days, on smiling days, gulls dipping low and crying out in mourning and grief on sad ones. But the gulf, steadying and mysterious and consistent and sad, had seemingly evaporated; when Adam rose at dawn and glanced across the bed, he saw nothing but the pale and sandy shore. Jade was close, close enough to touch, close enough to hear him, near enough that Adam might warm his cold hands in Jade’s hot rent sides; and while once, maybe, Adam had longed for that, he had come to love the gulf for its greyness and its secrecy and its aching, forlorn gestalt: the grey gulf between them, in all of its terrible strength and beauty, was as romantically charged with longing as the sea; and he had dreamed of sailing it one day, braving its perilous deeps, and crawling shipwrecked onto the shores of Jade. He had dreamed even of being welcomed, of Jade leading him by the hand onto a grand and sweeping ship, and stepping out onto a beach of white sand and the petals of wild flowers, feeling Jade’s heartbeat in his hand. He had never dreamed of a drought. Because Adam did not feel that they were closer, for all that the gulf was dried up and gone; he felt only that instead of a dark, calm greyness between them, prone to storms, there was a desert, scorching and dry and devoid of some necessary quality, some necessary _them_ ness, that had made the gulf seem so peaceful, so pleasingly sad. He had owned the gulf, or at least the idea of it, at least the view—as much as anyone can own such a thing, the gulf had been his, and it had been Jade’s, and it had been them together.

The desert, close and hot and dry and scratchy, that was not his. But it didn’t seem entirely Jade’s either. It was foreign, the heat and the closeness, the _proximity_. It was unfamiliar. Adam was too old of a man to discover new countries and tame new wilds. He was too old a man, even, to wake up next to the love of his life furiously beating off, or worse, staring into Adam’s sleeping face, watching with wonderment Adam’s uneasy slumber; he was too old a man for Jade to start rising early in the day, starting the coffee he could no longer drink and pouring orange juice, burning toast. He was too old a man for Jade to hum with pleasure when he left the house in the morning, kissing Adam’s unevenly shaven cheek and saying, eyes sparkling and voice a laugh, “I love you”. These things were different; these things were new. And there was a strangeness to them, a wildness, a quality that was not of him and not of Jade, something he couldn’t quite place or name. There was a wrongness, even, to the new intimacy, to the desert, to a Jade who was close and open and honest.

Adam’s beleaguered head hung heavy with these unsettling thoughts, and others. He massaged his chest tenderly, as if to soothe the battering there, as if to restore tattered tissue years in the deprecation. He did not want to get up. He did not wish to move. He did not wish, even, to breathe any longer; _god_ , Adam thought in sudden astonishment. _What a sorry piece of shit I am today. What Burgan said—when he asked me if I was happy—well, he was right. I’m not happy at all. Maybe I’m a deeply troubled man after all. Maybe there’s help to be sought for that._ But just then a fresh knife ripped through his heart, and he half-imagined he could feel the chewing, the tearing, of gnashing teeth; and Adam thought no more about whether or not he was happy, or whether or not he should seek help. Instead he gripped his chest in iron fingers and cupped palms, rocking slightly with the dizzying bursts of pain, and his eyesight exploded into a panicked blackness spangled with stars, and he fought for each breath, whether he truly wanted to breathe it or not.

 

 

 _Adam’s trying to kill himself_ , thought Jade, not caring whether that was irrational or not. Panic flared through him, and yet.

Adam had come home earlier than expected. Giggling, kissing sloppily, swearing at each other and uncooperative clothing, Davey and Jade had thrashed into clothing, hopped clumsily into recalcitrant pants; and with a last messy kiss and a fleeting grope of Davey’s ass, the boy had snatched his jacket, stamped on his boots, and tumbled laughing out the bedroom window. Jade had closed it behind him, lingering a moment to watch Davey slink along the side of the house, leaving footprints and the screen in the snow, before heading for the garage, intending to cut Adam off at the pass and give Davey a head start. That brought him here, careless and out of breath, standing frozen in the doorway, staring.

A far-away part of Jade prompted that there were any number of logical first steps to take: he could open the garage door, for example, or rush to Adam’s side; he could wrench open the door and breathe air into Adam’s lungs; he could dial emergency, get help.

But Adam didn’t appear to be moving. It was dark in the garage, and in the car, and Jade couldn’t see too clearly; but it looked to him that Adam was still, inanimate. While Jade’s brain still shouted out instructions, a thousand first steps to take before it was too late, Jade was dimly aware of his body moving without him—of each foot falling delicately, creeping lightly across the icy garage floor as if floating, gliding nearer and nearer the window. Jade did not know what he would see, or what he hoped to see, but it seemed important, somehow, that before he take any other action, he look.

When he was close enough to see in clearly, close enough to see the glassy whites of Adam’s eyes, he stopped. He stooped. He peered.

Adam slumped prone in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, chest heaving with labored breathing. Relief and something stinging coursed through Jade’s veins; _thankgodthankgodthankgod_ , he thought, for the car was not running. The keys hung from Adam’s limp fist, not the ignition. And maybe it ought have been troubling to Jade, that Adam slumped there in the seat, not moving; but it wasn’t. After all, it was finals weeks, and Adam had been so tired lately. Probably he was having a nap; bless him, that he was proud enough after all these years that he didn’t want Jade to see.

Not wanting to embarrass him, Jade glided back across the garage and into the house to put a kettle on the stove. He’d let Adam sleep, and he’d boil water for tea, and in ten minutes or so when Adam started awake and came inside, Jade would beam and smile and act surprised, kiss the man’s sagging cheek and praise fortuitous timing and pour out for Adam a cup of hot tea.

 

 

Whistling, something sunny and springing in his heart even as he trudged through snow, Davey made his way across campus. He spun in the swirling flakes, feeling dreadfully significant; he tried to catch one on his tongue and laughed joyfully, as if for the benefit of an audience, when snow dusted his cheeks and lashes instead. It was true that he was wet and cold from rolling a bit in the snow, when he dropped from Jade’s window; but Davey felt full of fire, full of life, and didn’t care.

Having an affair—it was glamorous. It was risky. It was sexy. More than that, though, Jade was a mature man—utterly unlike anyone Davey had ever known. He was an adult, didn’t laugh at bodily emissions and drunk text messages; moreover he knew what romance was, what _sex_ was, knew how to sweep a man off his feet. He had lived life, and was the wiser for it. He had experienced and learned more than Davey could dream of. To Davey, Jade was fantastical creature, elusive and mythical and beyond perfection.

One of Jade’s favorite things to talk about—more than art, more than genius, more than sex—was Davey. Davey’s writing, Davey’s beauty, Davey’s voice. It was more doting affection than Davey had expected from the man—from anyone, really. From the first Davey had found himself quite swept up by it. Jade was never without a dreamy stare on his face, an adoration on his lips. When they were together, he had eyes only for Davey; when they went out it was as if no one else existed. Jade looked through everyone else, even when they passed the truly beautiful boys, the ones that Davey had never been brave enough to so much as glance at. It was beyond flattering: it was like nothing he’d ever experienced. Of course, one of Davey’s chief character flaws was his propensity to imagine himself as special; but that imagining, that niggling sense of entitlement and superiority—it had never before been vindicated. He had never before experienced someone so beautiful and obviously gifted staring into the heart of him and whispering into his ear, “You are so special, Davey. You are so precious to me.”

It was no surprise, then, how quickly Davey had fallen in love. Davey had never been in love before; no matter how hazy and halcyon his days might have been with earlier partners, there was always a niggling revulsion, a failure to _match_. But he and Jade matched. They were the same. They thought the same thoughts and valued the same ideals. They were on a level of one another; and Davey had rarely felt that with anyone else. Whether that was a symptom of his arrogance or a cause, it was impossible to say; but Davey had never been in love with anyone before, and that made it especially notable that he had fallen in love with Jade. He felt light with euphoria whenever he thought of the older man, as if he might float away entirely when they were near; he felt happy not in a full, satisfied way, but in a dizzy and devouring one. And after every kiss, after every cry of passion, he tasted it, sticky syrup on his lips: _I love you, Jade_.

He had enough sense, at least, not to have said it yet. He always managed to bite it back at the last second. But it was a curious thing, because he didn’t want to keep this a secret; he wanted to shout it from mountaintops. He wanted to tell Nick, to tell Tabby, to tell Prof. Carson—to tell _everyone_. “I love Jade Puget,” he said aloud to himself, now, laughing a little with the sheer pleasure of it. “I’m in love with Jade Puget!” he said more loudly, grinning like a fool at the oblivious student he overtook on the slushy sidewalk.

The thing was, their first time together—intimately—had not been special. It had been necessity. It had been a tidal wave of lust, unstoppable, as a force of nature might be. But for all that, for all the romance and passion and power of that initial union, it had been in a public bathroom. And the first time they’d had sex, actual sex—that had been hurried and even a little disappointing, illicit thrashing and groping in another man’s bed. So Davey wanted the first time he told Jade he loved him, the first time he heard the words in return, to be special.

Davey had not considered, of course, that Jade would be anything but tender, and touched, and eager to return his sentiments. The way Jade adored him, physically and psychically, left no doubt in his mind that Jade returned his love as deeply, as feverishly. The moment, then, to say the words would be at the moment of Jade’s greatest triumph—Davey would step down from the stage, maroon choir robe hanging from his shoulders, soaring sound of Jade’s symphony and the audience’s thunderous applause still echoing, and slip into the wings instead of filing with the rest of the choir to champagne and praise-laden dressing room below. He would find Jade there, aquiver with his success, and Davey would press his lips to the composer’s, and they would embrace; and Davey would say, “You were magnificent” and Jade would murmur something of a kind, and then Davey would speak, trembling, the most significant words of his life: _I love you_.

Beaming, Davey walked on, so happy at the thought of his declaration that he didn’t mind as weariness settled into his bones, a distal ache the further and further he got from Jade. The tiredness he had not let himself feel before did not bother him as it settled in now; too many nights spent up on the phone with Jade, or desperately trying to catch up on his work, for he unfailingly spent afternoons and evenings and whatever scraps of time they had with Jade, had left him stretched thin. But today he did not mind it, feeling himself grow colorless and pale, feeling each footstep drain from him some essential glow of life; today he did not care. He was in love with Jade Puget: what mattered but that?

 

 

She knelt beside him, hands knotted, fluttering. Used to be the woman _alit_ —like a butterfly might, Melanie was, sweet soft Southern girl, slinking. But now, ballast, a ship: heavy, her iron hands dug into the armchair’s arm, her body _sinking_ heavy onto stiff and creaking knees—an old tree herself, these days, a tumor arboreal sprouting bulbous ‘round her once-supple trunk. Her words too hung heavy, imbued with new weight, this dreaded weight, this dread. Splitting lips, visceral and vile, teeth too sharp and tongue too pink and speaking: Well now Mr. Burgan, that’s quite a look you’ve got on your face. Her fingers, the last soft thing about her, maybe, like whispers of wind on his lined leather cheek, his baseball glove cheek, and a son to play catch with quick on his way—what would be left of him then? What was left of him now?

And answering, a cracked desert-dry voice and grey worn tongue: How long will you be gone?

A frown, then, creased a face once-familiar but something else, now, something else—and not his either. Stinging syllables strung saccharine, but he is not beguiled. Just a little while, her voice coming weary. Just until I… sort things out. A pause; a pause. He was right to dread the pause, the traitor’s pause, the pause in which a lever might wrench and a trapdoor might give way and a noose might swing, toes scraping. He could feel it writhing up in him now: something else something else something else, _his_ something else and beloved for it, ground he knew, ground a man might stand on, were he really a man.

Her voice careful now, like glass, sonorous of sorrow, tinkling and cracking and cracked, the last second before splinters shower, the last moment a crystalline woman remained beautiful and whole and so, so transparent. You know I love you, mister. This doesn’t change any of that.

They didn’t say the name, but there it hung between them, all her heaviness in and of and through it. This, the other. Theirs, yet not his. Theirs, but somehow hers and hers alone—hers to bear, hers to nurture, hers to feel and hold and take, hers to seize and steal and hide, his legacy in her hands, in her belly, at her mercy. And that, the only thing that would stay behind when he was gone, the only thing that would last save for his skeleton: that too now seemed to be escaping him.

What he wondered was, how much of Alexander was his, really? Was the father any part of the son? Because surely he would feel already if the son were a part of the father. What Burgan wanted to know, really, was whether his something else was his alone, or if the poison, so precious, wafted through those fresh-formed veins, coursing so near and new and vital the woman-tree’s own. What Burgan wanted to know was whether he’d recognize that selfsame son, whether the son would see and sense in him before seeing and sensing were within the repertoire, really, a something else—a specific, a peculiar, a something they might share, a something that wasn’t else, maybe, anymore; something that was maybe only other.

Melanie’s eyes, gelatinous and wet, fell on his with horrid tenderness, and he knew that he couldn’t bear it, if the something else resided in the other. What manner of man could live with such a self? He could not. He ought not. He would not!

A month, now, to decide. A month now for the life, frail and unfolding, to arrive. So big was his woman! How large and proud and strong his tree! And her eyes on him, and him thinking: no, not his tree.

And her saying without really saying: No, not your tree.  
And her, so big and strange and not-quite-his, limbs bowing and paper bark peeling to take the weight, standing: tall and round, a planet all her own, and more beautiful, maybe, than he’d dared realize, knowing that he held within him the something else, that which might be the other as well. Saying, really saying, lips and tears both brushing his shining, barren scalp, branches dead and shriveled, bereft of leaves: I do love you, Hunter. I just need a little time.

And her hands, gnarled and knotted and smooth, whispering together, pressed protective over her orb as if that might keep the other in, the other _out_ ; and her saying: We’ll be back before you even know we’re gone.

And her leaving. And him, knowing she had gone. And hearing, over and over, in the whisper of the leaves, of the leaving, what he’d never heard before: _we_.

 

 

Later that week, finals ended. Spent in more ways than one, Davey nestled his head in the crook of Jade’s elbow, the same smug smile of contentment on each face. Thanks to Tabby’s tireless efforts and the way Jade had of grinning, lips just inches removed from Davey’s aching denim crotch, and whispering practice questions, wet tongue flicking, Davey’s every fumbled answered another button of Jade’s shirt, of Davey’s pants—thanks to these things, and precious few others, Davey thought he had done rather well on his exams. Of course, greatly in his favor there was the fact that, at the last moment, Prof. Carson had canceled the final paper and replaced it with a 50-item multiple choice test. The test had been laughably easy; much easier than finishing his paper would have been, what with Jade finding it so irresistibly wicked to stroke his hands and lips over Davey’s skin while he wrote words for Adam. If Jade found it strange that his partner had, for what seemed to Davey to be the first time ever, deviated from his lesson plan, he certainly didn’t show it. He didn’t show much of anything when it came to Prof. Carson, and for that much, Davey was grateful.

At the moment, they were being careless. It was a bitterly cold day outside, but sunny, and an excursion to Davey’s dorm room had warmed them enough that they had braved it. Quite cheerful, Jade had marched him out into the December air, through the crunchy drifts of frozen and re-frozen snow, and to a dreamy, dozing little tea parlor in a forgotten corner of the campus. The woman behind the counter had seemed to recognize Jade right away, and register his hand threaded through Davey’s with some surprise, but Davey had quickly learned to dismiss the reactions of outsiders. No one looking on could understand the thing that thrived between them; everyone else in the world was so woefully outside of it all, and didn’t know love when they looked upon it—all they saw was sex and age and manipulation. Undeterred, Jade had led the way to a loveseat by the fireplace, and drawn Davey out to lay upon his lap. The woman took in the sight of them, Davey stretched out across the couch, head nestled in Jade’s arms, Jade quite contentedly stroking Davey’s unruly hair: but she said nothing, preferring instead to take their orders and retreat.

Jade stroked Davey’s cheek with quivering fingertips and bent his neck to steal chaste kisses at regular intervals. Their voices filled the tea room, sleepy and warm, though Davey was hardly aware of the words that were said. All he cared for in the world was Jade’s steady voice, Jade’s treasured touch, Jade’s unwavering heartbeat.

Two hours later, he couldn’t help himself, and the truth poured out.

“What the hell are you grinning about?” Nick had asked, crabby and stressed, preoccupied with—Davey thought—a distastefully plebian anxiety over his pending grades.

“I love him,” Davey said simply, happily, as if in a dream; and there was a good beat in between his saying it and his realizing it had been said, when the color drained from his face and he sat up much straighter in his chair, lips tight and eyes flashing. He did everything, in fact, but clap his hands over his mouth in attempt to reclaim his utterance; it was plain by looking at him that he had said something he did not expect to. Nick and Tabby, dedicated friends that they were, didn’t miss this string of nonverbal redactions—in fact, a blind man wouldn’t have.

As vultures do, Tabby sprung, prepared to spare no cruelty—but there was little enough need for it. “What are you talking about?” she asked slowly, and all at once Davey’s defensive posture crumbled and he relaxed, unable to keep an imbecilic grin from his face.

Davey began wistfully, “His name is Jade.”

 

 

For Adam, it began with a note on the door. It was Friday and he was feeling strong: the determined buzzing of his heart had not lessened, but it felt farther away, and he had the strength today to bear its nagging weight. Finals were over, and though he had more grading than he could stomach ahead of him, the advent of Christmas break had him in a good mood. On the Wednesday evening, he and the Burgans were driving to Boston for Jade’s concert; it seemed impossible that any ache or gloom or weariness—or tower of test papers ungraded—could linger in the face of that. Jade hadn’t had a concert—hadn’t written much of anything—in ten years. So: skipping heart or no skipping heart, Adam was in one of the best moods he’d been in for a long time. Things were changing for him and Jade. Indeed, his view about the desert itself had changed. The new closeness, the bare intimacy that it afforded—he’d renamed it, to himself. It wasn’t a desert; it was an effort Jade was making, or perhaps an effort of Adam’s at last succeeding. What the desert was, what the shifting static between them _really_ was, was a fresh tenderness. It seemed strange to him because it was a deliberate kind of love he’d never noticed before; it was the long, comfortable kind of feeling that kept the winter chill off his bones, the pulse and pattern of two people accustomed to being together, to living a certain way. It was a hopeful thought, but he entertained it gladly: maybe this was the way things were going to be from now on. Maybe they were finally settling into the routine of tolerance and understanding that all old couples did, eventually. After all these years, at last they might be successful and happy together. So it wasn’t a desert; it wasn’t even a beach. It was a brand new horizon.

As Adam pulled into the gravel drive, balding and treacherous with ice, he was thinking rather dreamily of how their lives might change, now. With his burgeoning tenure and the concert that he was sure would restart Jade’s career, they’d have some extra money. They could buy their own house, a luxury they’d never quite afforded, spacious and bright with a big, windowed room Jade could work in. They could have a fireplace, merry red brick, that filled his library with merry warmth; and their bedroom could be sprawling, with French doors and a skylight. They’d certainly be able to travel, get a reliable car. He could see it now: the new life of Adam and Jade. Their days of deficiency and despair, the days of sadness and wanting, were at an end. Adam could _feel_ it.

Adam parked his car in the drive, unable to say why, really, he hadn’t put it in the garage. He stumped up the cracked, icy sidewalk to his front door, propelled against habit by some refreshed sense of things, and fitted his key in the lock with more pride than the rickety little house had ever before instilled. It felt more like coming home, this way, stepping in through the front door, than meekly slipping in the garage did; and today Adam Carson was a man with a powerful want to come home.

Adam’s hand hesitated on his key, on the knob. A flash of white had caught his eye, even on a greying front door chapped with snow. He pulled the note down from the door, finding it peculiar; a familiar slanting hand had scrawled only a few words:

 

_Tenure meeting last night. Look for news soon.  
H.B._

 

Adam’s heart went ahead and skipped another beat in his chest. Look for news soon—Burgan wouldn’t have bothered with a note if it wasn’t good news, would he have? Surely a phone call or an email or even a note on his office door would have done the job for bad news. A note so pressing and personal, though, that it couldn’t be trusted to the interdepartmental memo system or his own rusting mailbox out on the street—that had to mean something good. Didn’t it?

Grin spreading on his face, Adam flung open the front door, clutching Burgan’s note to his yearning breast. “Honey, I’m home!” Adam called out, as comically as he was able, and marched into his home to sweep Jade off his feet with the good news.  


End Notes:

Thanks for reading, dears. I'd love to hear what you're thinking.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	13. Crescendo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for joining me once again, faithful readers! I had feared I would disappoint you this Wednesday, but allow me to take this time to assure you that I have not. As far as I can tell, the below is a fan-fucking-tastic chapter, and I dearly hope you will agree with me.
> 
> I don't own the boys and none of this ever happened. I'll keep it short today because you've got about a million words ahead of you--this is only the first half of what I intended this chapter to entail, by the way. I promise that this is the most manageable length I could cut it down to. That said--read on!

Maybe he didn’t know himself anymore. Maybe he had become a stranger after all.

Jade started seriously considering this at 11 am on Saturday, three days before his concert, when he leaned back from his desk, holding in his hands a finished third movement. Certainly it was a feeling unlike any other he’d ever known; but it wasn’t the celebratory rush of elation he’d expected. He felt wound up, unfinished. He didn’t want to stop writing; he wanted to blaze through the allegro, too, seeking that final crescendo, the freedom it would bring. The end of the scherzo, it turned out, was no release at all—only a teasing allusion to what might come, if he persisted.

Before Jade was really aware of what he was doing he was rubbing at himself through his jeans, other hand fumbling to dial a number best avoided and, shaky, press the phone to his ear.

Robert answered on the first ring. His voice trembled, pain on his lips, and Jade knew with a peculiar satisfaction that he hadn’t wanted to answer, that his hand had fumbled the phone open with desperation even as he wanted to ignore the ring. “Why are you doing this?” the man whimpered, sounding like a child.

Oh, yes. This was what he’d needed. Jade undid his zipper, wriggled free from his jeans, and sighed happily. “That’s not much of a hello,” he admonished, relishing the power he had here. Jade had not lived a powerless life—far from it. Adam had always been in the palm of his hand. Davey knelt there now too. Why, then, did he dial Robert’s number? He could have sought out Adam for release. He could have called Davey, snuck out to meet him. Instead, almost automatically, unthinking, he had reached out for Robert, for the broken pieces of a life he’d mangled, for the wreckage fresh.

“What do you want?” Robert asked now, voice a moan. “I’m at a motel. Marie threw me out. I—I have kids. Why are you doing this?”

Delicious. Jade let out a little murmur of pleasure, hearing the tears in Robert’s voice. “Oh, Bobby. Kids? You think you would have learned to keep your voice down. The little bastards hear everything.”

“Do you have any?” Robert asked, voice small. He was grasping at straws, looking for anything to hold on to. “Oh, god, you don’t think they heard, do you? God knows what Marie’s telling them.”

“I want to see you again,” Jade said, voice going breathy as he got closer. He was surprised to hear the words; did he want to see Robert again? It had been years. The man had probably grown old, pasty; what pleasure would it give him, pounding Robert’s doughy ass, that hurting him, humiliating him, had not? But as he’d said it, he realized it _was_ true. He wanted to look into the eyes of the man he’d broken. He wanted to taste the metallic, pleading gore that surely stained poor Robert’s lips.

Robert’s voice was strained; Jade could hear the weakness of his resolve, the futility of his feeble hatred. “Don’t call here again,” Robert said, syllables shaking.

“Talk me off,” Jade whispered, ignoring him, and heard Robert’s breath catch. It was cruel, it was crude. Jade didn’t know what kind of predator he was, doing this, demanding this—but he was close. So close. Half-mad for wanting it. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. Tell me what you want to do to me—what you’re imagining right now.”

He expected a dial tone. A dial tone, the grim satisfaction of it, would have been enough. But instead Robert mewed, Robert sniffled, Robert began to speak.

Jade called again that evening, and again on Monday. By then Robert was learning the game; the first thing Jade heard was Robert’s zipper, the next thing a helpless, teary voice; and Robert began to curse him in the same breath as he described where he’d touch Jade, and with what, and why. It was messy—Robert was awkward, with none of the articulate grace he’d come to expect from Davey, but eager to debase himself, aching at once with lust and loathing, imbued of violence, lush with pain. He punished himself with each sentence, flayed Jade with every word. Jade spoke more cruelly, with more disgust, than he ever had. After, panting and ashamed, Robert would stay on the line, listening to Jade breathe, and quietly cry. He told Jade about his wife, his children, the state of his life, all the wordless reasons they’d ever spent a night together. Jade said nothing. When Jade was done, when he had heard enough, he simply hung up the phone. He didn’t say thank you, didn’t say goodbye—uttered none of the words that were appropriate, that were expected. And each time he hung up the phone, he felt a little more refreshed, a little younger, a little stronger. He could feel his appetite growing inside of him—his appetite for sex, yes, for young firm flesh, but also his appetite for music, for fire, for life. He began to feel as if he could devour entire stars, planets, galaxies, and never be sated.

He would eat worlds.

 

 

Wednesday found Adam’s mood undiminished. He kissed Jade goodbye at breakfast, wished him good luck, and, not relishing the prospect of an empty house as much as he might have (because even now, even at half a century old, any place without Jade in it simply didn’t feel like home), went to his faculty office to do some serious work. The pain in his heart was almost gone now, a manageable twang, a slight flutter. Today it felt more like mild anxiety than any real harbinger, and he felt vindicated in abstaining from the doctor, slightly silly about his cardiac premonitions. His pale gloom of the last few palpitated weeks had set him seriously behind on grading; semester grades were due by Friday at midnight, and his grand, romantic plan was to spend the next two nights in Boston with Jade. He’d gotten their hotel room upgraded to a suite; Jade would find that out when he checked in that afternoon. Adam’s plan was to treat Jade to a celebratory night on the town—he had made dinner reservations. He’d even called Burgan to ask what kind of wine he should get sent to the room, figuring that most anyone would know better than he; but Burgan hadn’t returned his calls, keeping his cryptic silence, so Adam had ordered champagne and strawberries to be sent up at midnight, just after he and Jade would be getting in.

Adam’s excitement was palpable. He hummed to himself as he graded, rushing through papers and being far more generous than usual because it saved him the time of justifying low marks. He wouldn’t be able to stay a second night if he didn’t catch up, at least a little bit, on grading—and he wanted more than anything to fuss over Jade, to shower him in the congratulations and praise that he deserved, because he was brave and talented and beautiful and Adam felt that the pain and exhaustion exuding from his chest had precluded him from expressing that, when Jade had given him the news.

It was also something of an early Christmas present. For all the time that Adam had been teaching, by the second week of school they’d been wistfully planning their winter break getaway, only it had never happened. Two nights in Boston wasn’t exactly a dream vacation, Adam knew, but it was grander than anything they’d done in years. He couldn’t exactly afford it, but Burgan had been hinting so heavily about tenure; besides which, it was without question that Jade was worth it. A man like Jade deserved pampering from time to time, if only because he needed reminding of how special he really was.

Adam was looking forward to this all the more in light of Jade’s mood of the late—that which he’d mistakenly cursed as a desert. Jade had been kind, almost doting, patient to the extreme; Jade had cared for him, as an old lover might, and Adam had fallen asleep curled beside him more times in the last month than in the last five years. The static glare in Jade’s eyes, the brightness glowing from his upturned face, the buzz of vitality scarcely contained in his every movement—yes. It was going to be wonderful.

At noon, Adam took his phone from his pocket and carefully cleared a space on his desk for it, so he would be sure to hear it ringing. He was sure Jade would just be arriving at the hotel—sure that he’d be getting a phone call at any moment, Jade’s reaction to the suite or the Jacuzzi or the roses that were waiting for him in the room. By one, Adam had swept the phone off his desk in agitation and immediately replaced it—no, he shouldn’t call Jade. Of course Jade had arrived safely; he was almost definitely mired in preparations for the concert. If he didn’t have time to call, he certainly didn’t have time to take a call from Adam, asking blandly about his journey and fishing for a response about the upgraded room, the three dozen white roses. At two, when this rationale no longer satisfied Adam, he called the hotel; the desk clerk told him that Jade had checked in, and he was at least able to stop envisioning horrible scenarios of the Buick exploding on the highway on what ought to be the greatest day of Jade’s life.

Three o’clock and Adam headed home, dropping his Scantron test papers off with a faculty assistant to be run while he was gone. He hadn’t finished quite what he’d hoped to, but the stack of papers left was nothing he wouldn’t be able to power through Friday afternoon. He’d meet the deadline with time to spare—which was something he didn’t have at the moment. Adam stopped by the dry cleaner’s to pick up his tux on the way home, feeling a bit ridiculous on a bus loaded with students holding his garment bag, but of course Jade had taken the car that morning. Adam was due to meet the Burgans at five, and they were all making the drive together in the mind-boggling comfort of Burgan’s Audi sedan.

The bus didn’t go quite as far as Sycamore, and Adam’s pant legs were well and truly soaked with slush by the time he reached his door. Heart achey from the cold and the exertion of the walk, Adam draped his garment bag over one arm, jimmied his key in the lock with the other, stuffed the modest stack of mail between his teeth, and shivered over the threshold. The house felt eerie to him, empty of life: he wasn’t accustomed to coming home to any place unoccupied by Jade. He supposed he was rather spoiled by Jade’s decidedly reclusive nature; it was always rather nice to come out from the cold into an inhabited space, whether or not Jade’s presence felt inclined to warm it at that given time.

Adam turned on every light he passed, laying the tux out on their rumpled, unmade bed—which struck him as odd, because he thought he remembered setting it aright that morning, hating to come home from a trip to a disorderly house—and ran a hot shower he didn’t strictly have time for, because he felt chilled to the bone and deeper. He stood under the scalding stream until all his scrubbed skin glowed red and feeling, at last, returned to his extremities, save for the fingers of his left hand, which he marked as odd but dismissed along with the bedspread. Feeling that he had made himself late, Adam shaved quickly, splashing on a bit of long-neglected aftershave, and tugged a comb through his coarse hair. He dressed in his tuxedo—the pants would wrinkle a bit in the car, but they would only just arrive in time for the concert as it was—and, frustrated by a clumsy, unresponsive left hand, let the bowtie hang undone. He transferred his house keys, wallet, and phone into his tux pockets and, feeling a bit like he was forgetting something, shut off the bedroom light behind him.

He’d put on his dress shoes and jacket before he caught sight of the time. The shower had been shorter than he’d thought—he had forty minutes left before he was to meet the Burgans, and he was sure it wouldn’t be polite to show up quite that early. Perhaps if it were just Burgan himself that would be permissible, but he had a sister and knew how fussy women could be before a big event. He was sure Melanie would be rushing around, changing her mind about her dress at the last minute, ironing another, picking out new jewelry and shoes and then going back to the original outfit. That kind of madness quite happily belonged in the realm of straight men—and Adam could only imagine being roped into the process somehow, being forced to compare earrings and jackets and scarves that all looked the same to him, and always getting the answer wrong, no matter what she asked him.

At a loss for what else to do with himself, Adam stood in the kitchen—mindful of wrinkling the ass of his pants preemptively—and flipped through the mail. Grocery flyers, pizza coupons, junk mail and bills—a smattering of Christmas cards which, shit, he hadn’t even thought about sending out yet—and, peculiarly, two letters, both embossed with the royal purple Amherst crest, the words _Terra Irradient_ between a sunburst and a book. One was a thick, cream-colored envelope, linen stock if he wasn’t mistaken, and the other the crisp, severe white of the student advisory board. He fingered the thick, linen envelope with a bit of longing, his name lettered beautifully in precise strokes of real ink on the front, hardly able to guess at what might be inside it. In the end, he chose to open the altogether more threatening envelope first. The stiff white envelope was also hand-addressed, but this in the hurried, girlish ballpoint letters of an overtaxed staff secretary. The return address was preprinted in the upper left corner. Adam tore into it clumsily, glad at the last to have chosen it, as his numb left hand tore the envelope easily down its front instead of neatly at the seam. Employing his right hand only, Adam fished the somewhat mangled letter free, and began to read.

 

_Professor Carson,_

We are pleased to inform that upon careful consideration of your letter and an audit of Mr. Marchand’s performance, we have taken your student off of academic probation. His current performance is deemed unsatisfactory to the review committee, but Mr. Marchand’s scholarship will remain intact, pending his GPA at the culmination of the spring semester. Mr. Marchand has received a similar letter explaining the conditions of his reinstatement as a Dean’s Scholar.  
Thank you for writing on Mr. Marchand’s behalf. See you in the spring semester,

Judith Adler  
Interim Associate Dean  
LAS Advisory Board

 

Baffled, Adam reread the letter, trying to place the name Marchand. It hit him at last—Davey, Davey Marchand, the boy who had turned in a thoroughly disappointing midterm and largely abdicated from lectures after that. Adam grimaced at the realization hit him. He certainly hadn’t written to the board to endorse Davey—in fact, while he hadn’t finalized his grade book yet, he was fairly certain he was failing the kid. In any event, it wouldn’t have mattered _what_ kind of student he was—Adam hadn’t had any idea he was on academic probation, and furthermore would certainly never send the kind of letter that would garner such a response.

 _There must have been some kind of mistake_ , Adam concluded. There was no other assumption he could reasonably make. He had never in his career penned the kind of letter he was being accused—yes, _accused_ —of sending; he found it of poor integrity and low moral standards to intervene in that manner. He had always been of the firm belief that students ought to reap what they sowed. This didn’t mean he was rigid or unforgiving—of course he would make exceptions for a student with any real, officially documented distress—but he certainly wouldn’t have written such a letter. He couldn’t even imagine circumstances under which he’d be moved to. It was in his mission statement, on his resume—his students worked hard for, and well deserved, the grades he awarded them. Passing marks were not any student’s right. They had to be earned. As for trying to get someone excused from academic probation—well, that was the exact kind of political bullshit Adam Carson despised.

Someone else had to have sent the letter—some other professor. Cardill, maybe, in the English department. God only knew Adam got enough of that man’s mail. So it was a mistake for Adam to have received this, and it was good news—he supposed, with mild revulsion—that some other professor was waiting to receive. Things got crazy around this time of year, Adam knew. The advising offices were always flooded with scholarship and degree audits, transcript requests and the onslaught of semester grades. It was a simple mistake. The secretary charged with finding Cardill’s address had simply gone a line too far in the faculty directory. And if it seemed odd that Adam’s name would be on the letter itself, even on the envelope—well. There was doubtlessly some kind of explanation for the mix-up, because Adam did not think he was in the habit of drafting impassioned pleas on behalf of subpar students in his sleep.

Still, it was perplexing. Well, he could quickly get to the bottom of it; Adam tucked the two letters into his breast pocket and checked his watch. Yes, he had plenty of time to make it to board offices and back to Burgan’s by five. And if he ran late, well, he’d just have Burgan meet him at the office. It wouldn’t set them back much on their travel time; they’d certainly still make it on time to Jade’s concert; besides all that, Adam wouldn’t be able to enjoy even a moment of the next two days if he didn’t sort out this confusion first. He couldn’t stand being credited with the kind of deed, good or bad or otherwise, that he would never commit; the only way he’d have peace was if he sought the proper recourse. It was a simple matter, Adam told himself as he wound his scarf the tighter and headed back to the bus stop. It would hardly take any time at all to set things right.

 

 

Davey rose from the silky sheets, swinging his hips as he crossed the room because he knew Jade loved to watch, giggling in spite of himself as he buried his face in soft petals and smelled the roses for the nth time.  
“They’re just so beautiful,” he said happily, whirling back to face the rumpled bed where Jade lay, looking long and lithe and well satisfied. “I can’t believe you did all this! It’s so—so _romantic_.”

Jade smiled beneficently, patting the bed next to him. Davey returned to his side, still bubbling with delight. He slipped into the contours of Jade’s body, thinking to himself that they were made for this, that they were designed to fit together; and it was a foolish notion, but he was swept up in the romance of it all. God, if Nick and Tabby could see them now! That would fucking show them. As if Davey was just some kind of strumpet—as if he meant nothing to Jade. Age didn’t matter. Jade’s entanglement with Prof. Carson didn’t matter. This was _love_ , and love trumped everything. They were too young, maybe, to understand it; but Davey knew. Davey knew that these moments here were the only real ones in the world. Davey knew that you didn’t get a fancy hotel room with gold silk sheets and 36 white roses for just anyone. No; you made gestures like that for someone you _loved_.

Jade took his hand, twining their fingers together, and kissed Davey’s fingertips one by one. Davey thought he might die of happiness. “It’s a special day for us,” Jade murmured. He’d been saying things like that all day, ever since Davey had showed up at the ramshackle house on Sycamore, rosy-cheeked from the wind and dizzy with stage fright. Jade had calmed his nerves considerably, leading him wordlessly, with great reverence, to the bedroom; and he had undressed Davey carefully, letting their clothes fall away like forgotten skins, wisping to the ground around them, and he had brushed his lips over all of Davey’s skin, and they had made love silently, delicately; and Jade had handled him like he was a fragile thing, beautiful and made of glass, and when they lay there tangled in the after Jade had kissed into his collarbone, “You are perfect to me”.

It had been a trying drive, if only because it was difficult for them to keep their hands off each other; they had had to pull over at one point, and crawl into the backseat like teenagers, humping and groping and meeting messy relief. And then they had reached the hotel, and come upstairs to _this_ , and Jade had hung two tuxes on the back of the door, both dark and elegant, one for each of them; and he had laid Davey down upon the sprawling king bed, and they had made one another whole again.

It was impossible not to say the words. Davey had mouthed them, barely keeping from crying out, while Jade had moved above him; and he had cut them into Jade’s skin with flexing fingernails while the older man’s mouth demonstrated art and love and beauty at his waist. He had whispered them into the stillness of after, too, but when Jade had turned and asked what Davey had said, he had only hidden his face in the smooth, taut flesh of Jade’s chest, suddenly unable to speak them.

 _I love you_. Giddy and melting, he wanted to scream it. The moment was coming.

And again Jade said to him, “It’s a special day for us”, and Davey wondered if he was really so crazy to think that this meant Jade was leaving Professor Carson.

Finished with his fingertips, Jade pressed his lips to Davey’s wrist, flicking his tongue across the life that pulsed there. “The third movement is about you,” Jade said then, and Davey felt Jade’s teeth against his skin and shivered. “It’s yours. Did you know that?”

“No,” Davey whispered, scarcely able to speak. The hotel room—the roses—the tuxedo—the concert—this was it. This was the most perfect, romantic moment of his life. Jade was leaving him—Jade was leaving Prof. Carson. It was the only explanation. Today was the first day of the rest of their lives together—of their life together. Because this was love, and love was nothing if not eternal. Love was nothing if not forever.

“I started writing it the day I met you,” Jade said, voice low in his throat, lips moving up the inside of Davey’s arm, leaving behind deliberate, scalding kisses. “You were so beautiful. You _are_ so beautiful. The moment I saw you, I wanted you. And then music—it just started pouring out of me, after the longest silence. I’ve never wanted anything more than I wanted you to be mine.”

The kisses had reached Davey’s clavicle now. Jade bit lightly at his neck, sending more chills across Davey’s body, and headed downward again, pausing to catch a nipple in his teeth, grazing his lips lightly over the exposed white expanse of Davey’s submissive skin. Davey had never felt more beautiful, more perfect, more whole.

“I’m yours,” Davey whispered helplessly. Jade laughed into his skin, the sound and feel of it reverberating, Jade’s teeth scraping his iliac crest.

“Don’t I know it,” Jade said, lips brushing sensitive skin. Davey’s hips bucked against the glancing touches, well beyond his control. Jade kissed harder, unrelenting teeth beneath, pressing Davey flat again. “When you’re singing for me, Davey, I want you to remember that. I wrote it all for you. And the more I wrote, the more I needed you—the more I needed to see you. I was burning alive, Davey, for wanting you. Think about that, when the music’s around you. Because I need to hear your voice. I’m lost without it. I’m lost without you.”

Davey, no longer able to speak, moaned as his hips bucked again, tormented by Jade’s nipping teeth. Jade put his hands on Davey’s hips at last, thumbs rubbing against the protruding bones in that particular torturous way of his, and dragged his tongue over Davey’s erection. Davey’s hips tried to thrash again, but Jade held them in place, keeping the boy pinned flat as he closed his mouth over him. Davey cried out at last, unable to hold back. It was a primal thing, wordless, pure sound; but what it sounded like, if it sounded like anything but sex, was three specific words—three very specific words, and then, over and over again, a man’s name.

 

 

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” the woman snapped at last, exasperated. She had been frazzled when Adam had walked in, that much was apparent; the holidays were, pretty much universally, the most stressful time of the year, particularly for the overtaxed staff on a college campus.

“I don’t want you to say anything,” Adam said back, laughing a little, helplessly, to mask his own frustration, and to prove that he was being reasonable about all this. To further the point, he went on, “I don’t want to be unreasonable here, but obviously this letter is a mistake, and it should be redressed. I mean, this is essentially someone else’s mail. That’s a felony, isn’t it? Opening and reading someone else’s mail? All I want to know is whose mail it is, so I can make sure it gets to them.”

“The letter is addressed to you!” the woman said loudly, getting to her feet and shoving her glasses rather forcefully onto her nose. Adam began to feel a little threatened. To be honest, he didn’t like her tone. “The only conclusion _I_ can reach, then, is that it was _meant to be sent to you_.”

“But that’s impossible,” Adam pressed, giving a little laugh again so he didn’t seem difficult. “Do you see this bit here, where it refers to some letter I supposedly wrote? Well, I never wrote any such letter, so this is clearly not meant for me.”

The secretary’s eyes had a truly malevolent gleam to them now. “Professor Carson,” she said, long-suffering and at her wit’s end. “What do you propose I do?”

Adam hesitated, but only for a moment. He didn’t want to seem bossy but, well, he didn’t exactly want it on his record that he sent a letter on the Marchand kid’s behalf, because he simply didn’t do that kind of thing. “Maybe if you found the original letter?” he suggested at last. “I mean, then we could find out who exactly sent it, and—”

“ _It is the twentieth of December_ ,” the woman hissed, sounding exactly what Adam had always imagined a flesh-eating harpy would sound like, “ _and some of us have more important things to do._ Now, if you would calm down and wait until after the holidays, I can have someone—”

“After the holidays?” Adam interrupted. No, that wouldn’t do at all. He’d never be able to enjoy their vacation. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy _Christmas_ , for god’s sake. It seemed absolutely ridiculous that Christmas be ruined by a little thing like a misaddressed letter. “No, I’m sorry, I need to get to the bottom of this. I need to see that letter—well, today, actually. In the next—” Adam checked his watch and winced rather apologetically—“ten minutes, if that’s possible?”

The secretary gave him a look that plainly said she’d like nothing more than to whip her kitschy Barcelona paperweight at his skull, with intention to maim or kill. Teeth gritted, fists clenched, and everyone else in the office scowling daggers at him, she bit out, “I can try and get it to you by week’s end. No promises.”

His first mistake was probably saying, “Is that the best you can do?”

 

 

Burgan wasn’t answering his phone. After near-death by secretary, it was the last thing Adam wanted. He _was_ late now, by about three-quarters of an hour, and waiting for the bus would set them another ten minutes back—they’d never make it to the concert on time—but he didn’t see what he could do. Adam fussed with his the flapping ends of his bow tie on the bus, just for something to fidget with. His left hand was still unresponsive, his fingers stumbling dumbly over whatever task he set them too; worse, the arm was beginning to hurt. He was truly agitated by now. He hadn’t gotten to the bottom of the letter situation—though he was eager for Burgan’s insight on the matter—and Burgan was ignoring his calls, as he’d been doing ever since the cryptic note. His romantic getaway, Jade’s first concert in a decade, winter break—you name it, it was off to a bad start.

Adam got off the bus at last, carefully dodging slush piles all down Sycamore but still managing to fairly soak his leather shoes by the time he reached Burgan’s door. Truly annoyed and met with a new dull stabbing in his chest, he was a grim visage indeed; scowling, he didn’t stop trying to dial Burgan’s number until he was physically pounding on the front door. He was being accused of charitable acts, Jade hadn’t called him, he had a mountain of grading yet to do, and damn it, now his shoes were wet, his feet cold.

The door gave beneath Adam’s inquiring fist, swinging open to reveal a dim foyer. Cold, angry, confused, Adam stepped into the foyer without noting the strangeness of it. “Hunter?” he called out into the house, which didn’t feel nearly so warm or occupied as it had at his last visit. It, like his own, felt vast, gaping, devoid of life.

Like the rustling of dead leaves, like the creaking of tired wood, like the crackle and snap of ancient pages, a voice answered him. “In here,” it groaned, wind through the whistling branches of a lightning-struck tree. The voice was strange, knobby and abstruse, not quite right, not quite human.

But Adam did not notice this. Relief washed through his annoyance and he brushed from his pant legs onto the linoleum. “I got the strangest letter from the board!” he called, beating the once-pristine creases with his still-lively right hand. “Thanking me—thanking _me_ —for writing on behalf of Davey Marchand’s plummeting GPA! I’ve been down to the offices and the woman there is just a nightmare, won’t tell me anything—they’re insisting it’s not a mistake.” Adam took off his coat next, folding it bilaterally and dropping it crisply over the banister. He caught his reflection in the mirror and had another go at his bowtie. “But I never _wrote_ any such letter!” he cried, turning away from the mirror in disgust, stuffing his misbehaving hand into his pocket where he wouldn’t have to look at the pathetic, flopping thing. Satisfied that this was as good as it would get, Adam strode into the library, where Burgan’s voice had beckoned from, calling as he went, “Do you have any idea why this is happening?”

Adam stepped into the library. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness, which was even deeper here than it had been in the foyer. The windows were shrouded; the lights were extinguished. A dark shape moved on the carpet, a disconcerting slither. Adam stopped. Adam froze. Adam’s petty question died on his lips.

And Adam saw.

 

Backstage, Jade paced. On the other side of the curtain, he could hear the hush and murmur of the audience, the rustle of sheet music and the muffled scrapes of instruments from the pit. He’d floated to rehearsal as if in a dream, the taste of Davey still thick in his mouth, and felt nothing but free as he directed the crash of the oceans and the roar of the skies with precise flicks of his wrist, calculated sweeps of his arms. The voices of the chorus had risen around him and he’d heard Davey’s high, clear sound as one would hear an angel perched upon his shoulder; and he had been awash in his own power, his own accomplishment, the music that he’d tamed and pinned to paper. And Jerry had been slack-jawed, and there had been ripples of approval through the orchestra, and he had plastered an arrogant smile to his face, as if he’d never doubted, and fucked Davey in a practice room below. They’d exchanged smiles and whispered sweetnesses, each caress imbued with meaning, each kiss and gasp and touch a declaration, a _sign_. And Jade forgot that he even ought to feel any guilt for the things he did with Davey, the beautiful things, the freeing things, or that he did them in Adam’s bed or in an elegant suite that Adam had paid for, or that Davey assumed upon seeing the room that the roses were for him and that Jade hadn’t bothered to correct him. He’d broken the stem of one, even, and pushed the rose through the buttonhole on Davey’s lapel; and he’d kissed Davey’s mouth and said into the lips, “You’re perfect, you’re beautiful, I’m so glad you’re mine”, and that was as good as pledging himself, as desecrating everything he’d ever had with Adam.

Adam.

Jade froze in his pacing as if the name, the thought, was a physical force, one more than capable of bowling him over. And that felt true. Because, god, but he remembered Adam. He remembered holding Adam, touching Adam, having Adam. And maybe sex with Davey, nubile and unspoilt, was magnificent; maybe it was healing and maybe it made him young again and maybe it made him a god—but it wasn’t like with Adam. For all Jade’s insatiable hunger, for all his madness, for all his crazed craving for Davey’s flesh—it hadn’t even once been like with Adam.

He remembered loving Adam. He remembered the last time he’d been young, interminable years ago, and how much he’d loved Adam—he remembered loving Adam more than anything in the world. He remembered when the only thing that got him through the day or his classes or a shift at the shitty coffeehouse he worked in was the thought that, at the end of it, there would be Adam. Good, strong arms to settled around his shoulders, a broad chest to lean back into, a rouge’s smile and dazzling blue eyes and something kind or witty or wry murmured into his ear. He remembered how, in the beginning, even being poor had seemed romantic; the ironic flourish with which Adam would serve him Ramen, and how happy Jade would be to settle back into Adam’s heat on their couch, and how they’d waste hours of the night watching reruns of game shows, talking and laughing and just being near, and how Jade would fall asleep that way sometimes, he was just so damn happy.

He remembered that he would wake up in bed, even if he’d fallen asleep on the couch—that with the greatest tenderness and care, Adam would carry him to bed and pull the sheets up around him. He remembered how victorious he’d felt, the time or two he’d woken up still on Adam, still on the couch, how mercilessly he’d teased the man for falling asleep too, as humans do.

He remembered how in all the years they’d been together, even recent ones, Adam had been more than human. He had had the patience and kindness and devotion of a man more than mortal. And Jade had grown to despise him for that—had come to think of him as a fool, and had detested him and resented him the more with every setback, every _failure_ , being neither able to forgive him for being fallible or infallible, for being more than human or only a man. He remembered the height of standards he’d held Adam to, his expectations, and how rarely Adam had failed to meet them, no matter how high. He remembered the first scare with Adam’s heart, the serious talk the doctor had given him, charging him to be on the lookout, to make sure Adam stayed on his pills. He remembered loving that, secretly, for this was during one of their dark times—he remembered being thrilled to be entrusted with so great a thing as Adam, remembered how good it at felt to be able to give something back at last.

He remembered fighting, screaming until his voice went out, throwing things and cursing and pummeling Adam’s solid chest with his fists, and he remembered those few occasions when he had refused to share Adam’s bed, when Adam had graciously, then, taken the couch, and he remembered tossing and turning, unable to sleep, until at last he laid down on the floor beside the couch and only then, hearing the steady sound of Adam breathing, finding himself able to sleep. He remembered taking care on those occasions to rise early, before the sun did, so that Adam wouldn’t find out how much he needed him.

He remembered deliberately concealing his love from Adam and deliberately withholding it. He remembered all the times he’d undressed or stepped naked from the shower or ground his hips against Adam’s pelvis only to hiss at him for being weak, for being beastly, for daring to be aroused. He remembered the days and weeks and months he’d devoted to tormenting Adam, to making his life a living hell, and all the times he hadn’t known how else to punish himself, how else to break himself open but to reduce Adam to sharp edges and to fall upon them.

He remembered all the times Adam had cried in front of him. Four were funerals; one was the birth of his first niece; and the other two were times Jade had been wickedly cruel, times Jade had devoted entire days to devising the perfect, most hurtful lines he could. The first time he told Adam he didn’t love him anymore, when they were still practically children, only in their mid-30s; and again when he’d told Adam that he’d kill himself if Adam ever laid hands on him again. He remembered the way Adam had crumbled, then, as though dealt a mortal blow; and the way tears sprang to his fierce eyes, the exact way his jaw was set, the catch in his voice when he’d said _I just don’t know what you want me to do anymore, J. I just don’t know what you want me to do._ , and the unflinching determination in his leaking eyes as he’d asked if Jade wanted him in his life anymore, if he was trying to ask him to go.

And then, hardly a month ago, on their own front porch, the night Adam had asked if they were happy.

Jade remembered all of it. He remembered every minute, every second of their long lives together. Ever awful, amazing, unchangeable moment. He remembered every drop of venom he’d ever slipped into Adam’s veins, and he remembered each calculated bite he’d torn from Adam’s heart. And he remembered every time Adam’s eyes had lit up at the sight of him, flooded with admiration, every time Adam’s face and body and voice whispered gaily in his ear, “I’m the luckiest man in the world, J, because I have you”.

The white noise of the rustling audience dropped away suddenly, and Jade knew that the house lights had gone down; and sure enough, Jerry Finn’s voice filled the silence, booming out across the orchestra shell as it listed the orchestra’s credentials and sang Jade’s undeserving praises. Jade had never felt so lost or so small as he did just before stepping out from behind the curtain into the spotlight, into the audience’s thunderous applause; but he built himself up, as he always did, with the sole comforting thought he owned: Adam was there, in the audience, waiting for him. Adam was anywhere, really, alive and existing in the world, loving him.

As it always had, that gave Jade the strength to gather his composure, part the curtains, and go on.

 

 

Adam saw Burgan, hunched with madness, on his knees, eyes wild and flashing, lips slick and shining to match the singularity in his hand. At first the thing was only blackness to his eyes, as if it were sucking up the light, consuming it; and then the shape grew clearer, a slick silver O, a line and a weighted haft, a spinning barrel. Burgan listed towards him, eyes rolling, teeth flashing unnaturally white, revolver waving freely in his hand, still wet from the inside of his mouth.

“Good evening, Adam,” Burgan said, words slurring with psychosis, instability. He leered at Adam’s frozen form, electric blue eyes glittering madly. “You’re running a little late, aren’t you?”

“What are you—shit, Hunter, are you—are you all right? What happened?” Adam’s mouth was dry, his tongue a limp thing in it. Words were hard to remember, hard to form. Burgan’s eyes jerked, then, to the gun—the _thing_ —in his hand. He had a sideways way of ogling it, a strange fixation of his pupils, as if the thing were magnetic and his eyes couldn’t quite pull away.

“You mean this?” Burgan asked, voice rising, not in anger but hysteria. “Don’t worry about this, Adam, dear. Don’t worry about me. You have enough to worry about as it is, I should think!” The gun rolled again in his hand, as if independently of Burgan’s control, so that it swept the room, its hard black eye scanning from corner to corner of the room, staring for a moment into Adam’s eye before making long, close contact with Burgan’s own. He held it oddly, at a strange angle, and stared up into the muzzle as if it were truly looking back.

“Where is Melanie?” Adam asked in a low voice, scrambling. His hands were held up, palms out, an unconscious gesture. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. There was something in what Burgan had said— _You have enough to worry about as it is_ —that made him feel afraid. And then, unbidden, other words of Burgan’s came flooding back to him—in this very house, in the dining room. What had Burgan said that had struck Adam as so… so inherently _wrong_? Yes—he remembered—Burgan had said _I’m a happy man, Adam_. And the statement had sounded perverse even then, incongruous; but Adam had looked around him at the picture-perfect quality of Burgan’s life, so still and undisturbed and immaculate on the surface, and had thought rationally that the incongruity must lie within himself, that the reason the words resonated with inaccuracy, with outright _deceit_ , was because he himself was so deeply unhappy, so deeply sad.

But that wasn’t it. Because Adam was many things—a tired, romantic old fool chiefly among them—but he’d never been unhappy. He’d never even thought to consider himself unhappy, in fact, until Burgan’s declaration had echoed off all the wrong places inside of him. He had had a long, trying, and often disappointing life, but he had smiled through every day of it. He had smiled and laughed and lived well, damn it, because he had spent every day so deeply and wonderfully in love—because he had spent every day with Jade.

So the statement had seemed so painful and so false because on some level, Adam had recognized it as a lie; but he hadn’t been able to see that, not consciously, because it simply didn’t fit into the picture of Burgan’s life and his history with Burgan. It did, however, begin to make some manner of sense out of the man’s alarming, eclectic actions—the closer Adam looked at it, the more he was able to discern a hazy picture of what was happening here.

But he didn’t have the luxury just now of looking closely. Burgan was on his knees, staring into the stinking black maw of absolution as if it were the coy gaze of a favorite lover, and clearly not shy about waving that one-way ticket at anyone and everything in its range. Something had happened—Adam didn’t know what—but Burgan was clearly _not right in the head_. And while he couldn’t blame himself for never seeing it before, he couldn’t help but wonder why he’d never seen it before, why he hadn’t suspected—because this, this scene before him, it seemed rather a big thing to sneak up on a man unexpected.

And there was another question, an important one. Where _was_ Melanie? She ought to be there—they were going to Jade’s concert together, after all. That she wasn’t immediately in the room, immediately visible, was as much a relief as it was sickening to Adam. It turned his stomach. Some horrible knowledge twisted in his gut, and he repeated himself, belying none of the urgency that gripped him, fearing rightly it would spook Burgan further. “Hunter,” he said in as firm and commanding a voice as he could muster. “Where is your wife?”

Burgan smiled with too many teeth, tearing his eyes from the revolver to spin them unnervingly at Adam. Normal eyes, Adam was more and more certain, simply didn’t _look_ like that. “Gone,” Burgan said, and Adam’s stomach dropped. “She left. She left me.”

The only reason Adam did not thank god audibly was because he feared it might be rude to do so. And then the implication of what his friend, his deranged lunatic dangerous friend, had said sunk in. Melanie was gone—Melanie had left. That didn’t seem right to Adam, though he couldn’t explain why—only that she and Burgan were in love, and had been together for a long time; that she was pregnant with his child, and that they had seemed so happy. Adam had learned that love found a way—that there was nothing you couldn’t work through if you tried hard enough. The one thing he had learned in all his years with Jade was that. If you just _tried_ hard enough, you could be happy. Both of you could.

Burgan dragged the muzzle of the gun across his cheek, almost nuzzling it, and Adam was brought forcibly back into the reality of the situation. “I’m very sorry to hear it,” Adam said slowly, carefully. “Why don’t you put the gun down, Hunter, and we’ll talk about it?” He was doing well, he felt. Or at least as well as anyone in his situation might possibly do.

Burgan’s eyes were back on the gun. Adam immediately regretted drawing his attention to it. He’d barely finished the thought when Burgan’s eyes had flashed, jumped, and fallen back to Adam’s face. Burgan dropped his arm with the gun, wrist limp, so that the revolver rested on the rug, nestled in his palm. “You’re sorry, are you?” Burgan asked, voice at once calm, rational, and utterly depraved. “Sorry for me? It should be the other way around, friend. I’d rather be left by a thousand women than be half as blind as you are.”

“Blind?” Adam repeated without thinking.

“Yes, _blind_!” Burgan’s voice rose to a sudden, violent scream, and Adam jumped back, startled. He was sweating, he realized. His heart was throbbing. Every muscle in his body was screaming for him to run, telling him he wasn’t safe here, but he couldn’t run—couldn’t leave Burgan here, like this, with himself. It wasn’t safe for either of them to be in that room right then. Adam wasn’t going to leave his friend behind.

Burgan’s voice dropped back to a more normal volume, once again dulcet and oily and crazed, an edge of hysteria hidden within. “You come in here and ask me why the board thinks you wrote them a letter about Davey Marchand? Are you so stupid, Carson? Are you so willfully blind? Did you tear your own _eyes_ out? Because I don’t—I can’t—how else aren’t you seeing it?”

“What are you talking about?” Adam heard himself asking, as if from very far away. Even as the words left his lips, he knew. Even as he asked it, he wished he hadn’t. There was an answer, of course. For any man brave enough to hear it, to see it, there it was.

“They’re _fucking_ , Carson, you stupid prick!” Burgan shouted, hurling ugly words, eyes burning, spit sprayed in a burst from slimy red lips.

“W—what? Who? What are you—” Adam stammered, falling silent at the last, staring at Burgan’s crabbed form as helpless as if the gun were still aimed for his beating breast.

“Jade’s _fucking_ him, in your bed and in your classroom, in the Starbucks bathroom and in the stacks—in your living room, Adam, don’t think I haven’t come home to see that skinny pale ass smacking against your fogged windows.” Burgan’s words swirled out of him, unstoppable, and Adam fought desperately the urge to clap his hands over his ears. It wasn’t true—what Burgan was saying, it wasn’t, it couldn’t be—

An unmade bed. An unexplained bicycle. A shadow darting past the window. A whisper, a laugh. The way the two sprung apart when Adam had entered his own library, that night so long ago. The day he thought he had seen Jade, just after class, ducking into a corner—the way he’d been so certain that he’d heard the man’s familiar, boyish laugh.

“I don’t know what you’re—” Adam, spluttering now.  
Burgan, shouting, a bright joy upon his brow: “Your student! The boy! The one whose paper you were so taken with, the one who _you_ never wrote to defend! I’ve seen them together, Carson—they’re not careful. They’re not discreet!”

“Jade would never,” Adam fumbled next, unable to spit out more than a fragment, unable to _think_ more than a fragment.

“Jade _would_! Jade _has_! He is fucking around and he has been for months! I’ve seen it, Adam—I’ve fucking seen them! All anyone has to do is look through your front _windows_ to watch them fuck! He likes them young, Carson; maybe he’s been doing it all along, that lying little slut you’ve shackled yourself to! He’s got something inside him, Carson, and not just the Marchand kid—something dark, something hateful, something that won’t be satisfied until there’s nothing left of you!” Hunter’s eyes were brilliant, sparkling like scarab beetles in starlight, and his cheeks were flushed and his throat was hoarse and spit punctuated his every accusation, and it was terrible to hear, and Adam couldn’t take it anymore.

“Shut up!” Adam yelled, voice big and loud and the only shred of power or dignity he still possessed. “Shut the hell—you don’t know _anything_ about Jade! He would never—I _love him_ , all right? Don’t you think that means anything? We’re _happy_ , goddamn it—we’ve been _happy_.” Adam’s hands knotted into fists. Adam’s jaw clenched painful tight. Burgan’s manic grin and burning eyes.

“Maybe you’ve been happy,” Burgan said quietly, dangerously, eyes glittering mad, lips twisted and torn into a shape only loosely resembling a grin. “But while you’ve been so fucking happy, he’s been on his knees, sucking cock.” And moving so suddenly Adam started, again, thinking this was it, he was doing it, Burgan flicked the wrist of the hand cradling the forgotten gun, sending the revolver skidding across first rug and then hardwood to thud at Adam’s feet.

“What is this?” Adam whispered through gritted teeth, bending down quite helplessly to pick up the gun, even as his hands quaked with anger. “What are you doing?” The metal surprised him with its heat, with its livingness—he had thought it would be a cold thing, a dead thing, but instead its contours melted to fit his hand, and the weight of it came as a comfort, the way a lover’s hand on a troubled shoulder might.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Burgan asked, eyes boring into Adam’s, reading Adam’s thoughts and knowing Adam’s mind, really seeing it. “I’m asking you to shoot me in the head.”  


End Notes:

...Well?

Was that as good for you as it was for me?

...Guys?

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	14. Act II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won't keep you. I don't own the boys and none of this happened.

The lights came up and Davey’s heart began to hammer. He shifted his weight, glancing at the men and women on either side of him; they all stared straight ahead, breathing evenly and smiling. They were, of course, a professional choir; to them, this was a nice send-off to the holidays, a one-night engagement and a totally run of the mill experience. The choir was a teeming mass, anyway—each of them was faceless. No single voice would really be heard. There was no reason to be nervous.

Still, the stolidity of his companions didn’t make Davey any less nervous. He’d done well at rehearsal, but he hadn’t had any of the experience that these people did—he’d never sung in a choir, not even in grade school or at church, and he’d never had any aspirations to sing professionally. He closed his eyes, trying to pretend he was standing back in Jade’s cluttered office, that his voice (like the rest of him) was for Jade alone and there weren’t hundreds of people in the opera house, that there were no professionals alongside him to judge every mistake and be thrown off by every flat note.

Grateful that the lights, at least, blinded him to the faces of the audience, Davey fingered the rose in his lapel nervously. He had good reason for doing this, he reminded himself—he was here to give strength to the man he loved. Davey’s anxiety quelled a little at the thought. _It’s a special day for us_ , he reminded himself of Jade’s refrain. It wasn’t just roses. It was Jade’s comeback concert—it was the night they would profess their love, the night Jade would leave Prof. Carson, the night everything would change for them. Davey wondered where they would live—after all, he had two and a half years left at Amherst, and even if he was going to write full-time, he wanted to finish his degree. Maybe Jade would get an apartment near campus; Davey could move out of his dorm room and spend all day, all night, at Jade’s side. With Davey as inspiration, Jade would finish his symphony in no time: Davey didn’t doubt that it would be wildly successful. Jade would have another tour after that, a proper one, and they could live comfortably off the proceeds of his record sales while they both worked on their next masterpieces.

Davey rubbed a meaty flower petal between his finger and thumb. Of course it wouldn’t be perfect. He knew that. He wasn’t stupid. Even if Jade wanted to leave Prof. Carson—and Davey didn’t doubt, now, that he would, once they declared their love—he knew that the dissolution of such a long union would be a drawn-out, messy agony of an experience. And it was unrealistic to expect Jade to live in Massachusetts, on the very same campus as his ex. Maybe he’d move to Boston; Davey could bus out on weekends to visit.

The more he thought about it, the more he tried to plan it out in his head, the more the pieces fell apart. The petal tore between his fingers and he started, evoking a glare from the man at his left. He let the ragged pieces flutter to the ground and dropped his hands to his waist, sighing. It just—it didn’t work like he wanted it to. What was he going to do? Invite Jade home with him at Christmas, to meet his family? No. God no. They’d be furious. They’d kill him. They’d kill him and Jade both! Their love was something that wasn’t designed to be understood. And that had seemed romantic, unbearably so, once. Now… now he just wanted to bring his boyfriend home for the holidays, or bring him along to a movie with his friends, or even hold hands in public without garnering looks of shock and horror. The disapproval of others was scintillating, sure; the secrecy of it all was a huge turn-on. But Davey was exhausted of the charade. He loved Jade. He was up on this stage, palms sweating, preparing to sing his heart out, because he _loved_ Jade. He didn’t want to make excuses; he didn’t want to defend it. He loved Jade, and it was the simplest, most natural thing in the world, and he wanted it to be as easy as it felt.

And that was okay, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that all right?

It tore him up inside, of course, the thought of Jade continuing to live in Prof. Carson’s loveless house, laying next to him each night in their barren bed. Davey hated to keep sneaking around when he wanted to love Jade freely, openly, as was any lover’s right. But there was no scenario he could dream in which the dissolution of Jade and Prof. Carson’s relationship ended well for he and Jade.

For the first time, Davey cursed his youth, his clumsy inexperience. If only he were older! Even if he were a senior, just those two years would make the difference. Then he could follow Jade anywhere and they could begin a life together. What was his choice now? To wait two and a half years? To expect Jade to stay in a loveless union for another two and a half years, for Davey’s own convenience? And god—he was so young. It was juvenile, but—what would happen as Jade grew older? Davey would turn thirty and Jade would be—Jade would be twice that. Davey’s hair would begin to grey and Jade would want to move to Florida and play shuffleboard. Davey would hit retirement age and want to travel, and Jade would shrivel up and die, out of life.

Tears clawed up in Davey’s throat and he tried to banish his idiocy. Nothing had to be decided now! He didn’t have to _think_ these things now, when Jade needed him, when he needed to stand and smile and sing. He wouldn’t stop loving Jade, he vowed firmly to himself, no matter what—whether he left Prof. Carson or stayed, whether he grew old and feeble or enjoyed an everlasting youth. And that would be enough—love was enough. Love had to be enough, goddamnit, because that was all he fucking _had_ anymore.

Davey puffed out his chest, drew his bravery about himself. The music was growing, now. He could just make out Jade, ringed by stage lights, a tiny figure at the foot of it all, the wings of the choir and the great swell of the orchestra, his back turned to the awe-slackened jaws of an audience that scarcely deserved to worship him. Jade’s arms swept and twisted and snapped, spelling out secret signals Davey couldn’t read, and though Davey tried to make out the look on his face, the angle was wrong—because surely Jade wasn’t frowning; who could be unhappy now?

Davey closed his eyes for a moment, letting it flow over him, letting the vast, thunderous sound of _Jade_ , his Jade, sweep over him, saturate him; he drank it in, he breathed it, he took more and more until he could no longer tell what was him and what was the music; and it moved within him, a stirring little tug, and he knew it was time to sing. Davey tipped back his head, filled up his lungs, and sang his heart out.

 

 

For Jade, there wasn’t any definite moment when he realized it was all a lie. He wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact second it had all come down around him. All he knew was, one moment it was amazing and exactly how he’d dreamed it, the music huge and all around him, inside him, singing the terrible, vainglorious, burning ballad of all his days—every defeat, every agony, and yes, yes! every joy—and he knew it was the sound of the human heart and that there was no one in the audience unmoved. And then the chorus started and the chorus, too, was an organ, a massive, throbbing thing, and their tongues were vicious and sharp and beyond beautiful, and it was perfect, he was a genius, he had done it at last—he would be celebrated, he would be lauded, he would finish the sonata and before the ink had even dried The Thousand Year Score would be mentioned in the same breath as Schoënburg, as Tchaikovsky, as Bach—

And then he was hearing it, really _hearing_ it, for the first time, and it was shit. It was total, utter, shit. It was a disaster. It was crap. It was—it was—it was a forgery. It was a sham. It was a _lie_. He couldn’t explain it, not really; it was just that suddenly he could hear it, the lines and bars so familiar, and he could see every gimmick and each embellishment, and it all seemed so hollow, so false.

Oh, it was his masterpiece all right. It was his greatest fucking lie. It was all he could do not to turn around, to simply let his arms fall to his sides, abandon the orchestra; he would turn, and face the audience, and be blinded by the lights like the pathetic moth, so small and dusty, that he was; and not knowing how to proceed, the orchestra would crumble, the instruments falling away one by one, and the voices would fail awkwardly, one at a time, and he knew that Davey’s would go on longest, high and pure and quavering, and when all fell silent, he would be complete, he would be perfect in his humility, his disgrace; and everyone would know it, as surely as they now heard it, what a sorry, false fool he really was.

Jade did not do any of these things. He kept his face solemn, mouth an iron line, and continued to conduct the train wreck that he’d written. He didn’t deserve to stop—didn’t deserve the easy way out—didn’t deserve to stare confused and lost up at the audience, up at Adam, and admit his lie. No: it was best that they all think that he believed it. It was best that they all think him a sorry old fool, washed up and burned out. There was a reason, he realized painfully, as the travesty he’d written filled up the opera house so horribly, that he had passed ten long, stale years unable to write freely, each lackluster note a vicious battle. That long, fruitless battle, it was the truth of things. It was how life went. It was the sound the score had been designed to captured—the long, aching futility, the unbearable _barrenness_ , of a man’s life.

But then—this false youth, this self-shamming passion—this lie. It had merit, too. He would keep, then, conducting; and he would not allow himself to remove it from the symphony, no matter how mortified he might be to hear it, no matter how he might hate it, no matter how the critics might flame it. Because it, too, had played a part. Truly, it belonged to Davey, more than Jade had ever realized. It was the sound of his folly, his foolishness, his great blinded blunder into what he thought he was owed.

Oh, god. Adam was out there, Adam was in the crowd, Adam was listening. Like a knife to his fat, swollen heart, gorged on too many men, Jade knew that Adam would hear it too, would hear the false ringing of the lie. Adam would know, more clearly than if he’d caught them in the act, what Jade had been doing with Davey. And—and Jade deserved that. If he lost the great love of his life for his foolishness, for his base stupidity—well, he deserved that too. The humiliation, the loss of esteem, the twisted burning wreckage of what was left of his career—that wasn’t enough. If he lost Adam, he deserved that, too.

He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t. It was just—he deserved to lose Adam by merit of the transitive property. He knew he deserved to lose Adam because he knew he didn’t deserve to have Adam, hadn’t deserved it in years, hadn’t deserved it _ever_ , and somewhere along the line had stopped feeling grateful and started feeling resentful and, well, look at the mess he was in now.

Jade conducted every last grating note of his godforsaken symphony, and felt physically ill when he turned and bowed at last, the audience’s applause trickling in and growing, because some of them had been fooled. Those of more discerning taste withheld their applause, hearing it for the shit that it was; and eventually the whole hall was given over to it, as the orchestra stood and bowed, and the choir as well, and Jade wanted to scream and cry and claw off his skin, because he hated himself, he hated himself, he _hated_ himself.

He didn’t love Davey, and of course he never would. Adam was the only man he’d ever love; and, careless as he’d been with him, the thought that he might be able to tell Adam that was the only thing that kept him on his feet. He imagined Adam, still in his seat, slack-jawed with disbelief or, perhaps, rigid and blazing with anger. Burgan and Mellie would stand and applaud, trying for Adam’s sake to hide their distaste, but not Adam. Adam would be sitting, teeth clenched, and he would have hated every note. That was why Jade loved him: because he was certain, now, that Adam at least had had the sense to hate every note. Jade was shaking, trembling like a newborn bird. There were tears on his cheeks as he bowed one last time, but the audience couldn’t see them; they were too far away.

 

 

The rational thing to do—the _sane_ thing to do—was to fling the gun away from him, from both of them, in incredulity, in horror. _Of course I’m not going to shoot you in the head_ , he might say. _Don’t be preposterous!_ he might exclaim. It would all be very quaint, very rational, very much what anyone in his situation would do, what any sane person ought to do.

But the gun was still in Adam’s hand, feeling right. And his heart was roaring, furious and overwrought, and he was breathing heavily, through his mouth, and all he could see was Burgan’s twisted shape on the rug and Davey’s body coiled lewdly, and Jade’s beautiful eyes glittering as he laughed, and the way he drew his lips into a pout while he shimmied out of his snug jeans, and Davey’s hands on him, Davey’s hands on him, Davey’s foul little _hands_ on him.

“Yes,” Burgan whispered, hoarse, leaning forward eagerly. He licked his lips, thick pale slugs, shining. “Yes, yes, do it.”

Adam stared at Burgan as if he’d never seen him before, and his hand shook, and his arm began to move, slowly, jerkily, up and up and—

And Adam returned to himself all at once, flinging the thing away, the gun skidding across the carpet and then skipping on the wood and then spinning, Russian roulette, and coming to a halt. Burgan cackled madly and Adam saw what was going to happen before it did, but had no time to stop it; Burgan, on moment supine and the next animated, springing to life, pounced on the revolver before Adam could so much as move—and had he been able to move, had time stood still and had he lifetimes in which to act, he didn’t know if he could make himself go near the gun again, if he could stand to feel it in his hand and hear it in his heart, so wakeful, so alive.

“Didn’t think you’d have the balls for it,” Burgan chattered now, cradling it to his chest like a blue, stunted child, and Adam didn’t know what to do, what he could do, only knew that he was angry—so _angry_ —and confused, and afraid. “It would have been easy for you, you know, to just squeeze it, if you were any kind of fucking man—which you’re not, of course, if you were a man Jade wouldn’t have needed that bitch student of yours nine times a day just to get by—how fucking miserable do you think you made him, Carson, to drive him to this?” Burgan cackled again and a small part of Adam wished he’d shot him, wanted to wrest the gun from his hands and shoot him. And Burgan’s voice changed, dropped, and he was speaking less to Adam now, and a hysterical sadness entered his voice, his eyes. “Old, worn-out, impotent, weak,” he spat. He looked to Adam, still clutching the revolver to his breast, and his eyes were pleading. “I don’t want to fucking be that, Adam. I don’t want to—I don’t—god, I just, Alexander, Adam. Alexander. He’s—I’ll be so old to him, so dead, from the day he’s born I’ll be dead. He’ll have soccer games and Mellie will struggle with my wheelchair on the grass, and I’ll be breathing through a tube and eating through a tube and pissing through a tube and shitting myself, shitting everywhere, and he’ll graduate high school and I’ll wander across the football field, confused and lost and drooling, and he’ll graduate college and I will already fucking be in the ground. As soon as this thing, this kid, is born, I’m dead, Adam, I’m dead—and what if he’s like me?”

Burgan’s eyes were leaking wet now, his nose shining with snot, and the humane thing to do would be to go nearer, to touch his shoulder, touch his arm, to prise the gun from him and comfort him, but the steel eye was on him and Adam couldn’t move. Voice broken and stroking the gun like it was some precious thing, Burgan seemed unable to stop speaking: “What if he’s like me, Adam, what if he has it inside him, what if he has this inside him, the something else, the—the—this is not fucking normal, this is not what people—it’s the something else, with its fucking teeth, with its claws—I’ve never been like them, Carson, never been like—it’s always there!” Burgan was shouting suddenly, shouting and spitting and crying, and the gun was in his hand, and it was waving, and there was nothing but loathing in Burgan’s eyes.

“Don’t you fucking get it?” he screamed, eyes rolling wet, bulging, fixed on Adam but not seeing Adam, raising the gun and pointing and shouting—

“It’s always here! It’s always here! I never have any peace—it never leaves me! It’s always fucking _here_!”

—and shooting, a bullet, a gunpowder flash.

Darkness.

 

 

After the concert, charged with adrenalin and high on success, Davey sought desperately for Jade, his declaration bursting from his still-heaving breast. He had never felt so wonderfully alive; he wanted to throw himself into Jade and immolate, fatally, finally, fantastically. He was still half-deaf from the roaring crescendo, still half-mute from the vocal strain; but he was _full_ , full of so much, and couldn’t wait another moment to spill it into Jade.

The only problem was, he couldn’t find him anywhere.

At length Davey found him underground, in the soundproof cinderblock practice room they’d met in earlier. Jade had his overcoat on, was gathering up his scattered things and shoving them into his bag, his scarf hanging off him in a limp tangle, his eyes blazing—not the ebullient picture of success Davey had imagined but instead a crooked portrait of decay, disarray. But never mind that: he was beautiful: Davey loved him.

“There you are!” Davey cried, filled with enough joy for the both of them, and flew to Jade’s side. Jade hardly looked up, made a noncommittal sound of recognition, and pushed Davey’s own bag into his hands.

“That was wonderful. That was _beyond_ wonderful,” Davey raved, undeterred, setting his bag down at his feet. “That was—god, Jade, you’re a _genius_!”

Hunched over his bag, Jade’s huge body seemed crabbed, vibrating noisily against constraints, stuffed into too small a space, too cramped a form. The energy around him seemed to crackle audibly, ugly and dangerous and raw. Davey hesitated. Jade looked up, slowly, face tight and drawn, and stared at Davey in a way that made it hard to breathe—not in the good way. Davey’s body tensed without his permission, waiting for a blow to land.

“Thank you,” Jade said, voice clipped. And that was all—he threw his bag on his shoulder and straightened, cutting a dark figure, violent with potential energy. Davey stepped aside without meaning to, so succinct was his implied dismissal.

“I—wait,” Davey stammered. Jade turned on the threshold and stared down at him, imperious, one eyebrow slightly raised, and then swept out of the room. Davey threw his bag onto his shoulder and stuffed his coat over it, hurrying after Jade. “Jade, wait!” Closing the distance between them, Davey grabbed Jade’s arm, too roughly. Jade stopped in the narrow hallway, empty but for their voices, and looked down again at Davey. The brightness, the warmth, that usually lived in his eyes was gone. “I love you, Jade,” Davey said weakly, and he’d been wrong. It was nothing like he’d imagined.

The words hit Jade visibly, the stiffness from his shoulders flowing out in a slump, the thin line of his mouth sagging down at the corners, his head bowing and his large hand appearing to pinch the bridge of his nose. He took a breath before looking up again. “Excuse me?” he said at last.

Everything was so, so wrong. Davey remembered a few hours ago, the adoration he’d seen plain on Jade’s face, the words Jade had spoken— _you’re perfect, you’re beautiful, I’m so glad you’re mine_. Jade couldn’t look at him now like his love was unfounded; he couldn’t, not when he’d said that, not when he’d been _saying_ things like that for a month now, not when they’d stolen every second together they could, when Davey had given him everything, everything. He couldn’t drop his shoulders and bend his neck as if it were a burden on him, couldn’t wearily say _excuse me?_ as if he hadn’t heard—couldn’t act as if Davey’s declaration were some kind of imposition unbidden, because he had bidden, damn it, he had fucking _bidden_.

“I love you,” Davey repeated, more fiercely now, feeling strong and angry and young, feeling large and powerful and indomitable in his bright flashing anger. _I have a_ right _to love you_ , he said without so many words; he set his shoulders and raised his chin sharply and met Jade’s disbelieving stare with one of his own, hard and fought for and bold. Less loudly, there was too a slick hissing accusation— _you_ made _me love you. This is on you._

“I—Jesus, Davey,” Jade said, not pretending anymore. He threw his hands up—exasperated, dissociating, as if it couldn’t be helped. “I don’t have time for this right now, okay? I’ve got to find Adam.”

Never had as crippling a blow been born with as much dignity. Davey inhaled sharply, feeling everything flowing and alive within him suddenly crystallize sharply, into so much spiky black lattice, so much twisting iron cord; he felt the love in him break down into sharp, bloody fragments of strength. His heart did not beat: it flagellated. He devoured himself.

“Adam,” Davey parroted coldly. “You don’t _love_ him, Jade. You don’t need him. You love _me_. I’m youth and fire and beauty and—and—I’m the scherzo, remember?” Desperation began to seep in the puncture wounds, began to swirl claret and clouded around the pieces of himself; his grace dissipated, and he was a child again, trembling with a quaking voice, righteous and wronged but very small—very small and not strong, just bloody.

“Yes. You are,” Jade said dispassionately, giving a decisive nod and hitching his bag up his shoulder. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Jade made to turn away again, and the words burst out of Davey, raw and without pride.

“What about me?” Davey asked, hearing how weak and mewling it was but unable to stop himself, because he was weak, he was hurt, he would mewl. The hotel room—the flowers—the gifts, the words—the sex—the scherzo, the goddamned _scherzo_! “Where am I supposed to go? How am I getting home? You brought me here. You _brought_ me here.”

That did give Jade pause. “Yes,” he said, distracted, giving Davey a sharp look. “Yes, I guess I did. You… you’ll have to come with, then.”

Davey couldn’t take it anymore. He let his bag hit the ground, took both hands and planted them firmly on Jade’s chest, that same expanse he had kissed and licked and bit just hours earlier, and gave a full-bodied shove. “I love you!” he yelled, too loud, words ricocheting painfully. “And you—you love me back. I know you do!”

“You don’t know anything,” Jade said, anger rising in his voice to match Davey’s desperation, but his anger didn’t seem so terrible a thing just then; his hatred didn’t seem as if it would be too wretched to bear; and with heartbreak already upon him, Davey didn’t care at all what Jade might do or say, because there was nothing left—nothing to lose—no new way he could be hurt, no fresh way he could be broken.

“Fuck you!” Davey cried out, fury and tears streaming from his eyes. “I fucking come to Boston for you, I sing at your goddamn concert, I barely pass my classes and I give up _nursing_ for you, and when I tell you that I _love_ you the first fucking thing out of your mouth is ‘I have to find Adam’? ‘I don’t have time for this’? You had better fucking _make_ time, Jade Puget, because I am not going to just—to just slip quietly away into the night! You are fucking _dealing_ with me. I am your fucking _responsibility_ now!” Davey stepped closer, crying freely now, and made to shove Jade again, but his strength left him, and he fell against Jade’s chest. Jade held him awkwardly, as if it was new to him, as if he didn’t know, as if he hadn’t marked, every inch of Davey’s skin; and that broke Davey’s heart all over again, and he pressed his face into Jade’s chest and he sobbed.

 

 

The moment he knew Burgan was going to shoot, Adam came to life again, turned from stone back into flesh, turned from hatred and fear back into the man he’d been before and the man he’d still be after. Burgan was screaming, not making any sense, and he was waving the gun wildly, and a look crossed his face and Adam knew Burgan was going to shoot himself in the head and he had only a moment to act.

This time, he did what anyone would have, as long as anyone wasn’t the sort to drop and cover himself and scream. His body uncoiled into one great spring and he flew, moving with an agility he hadn’t possessed in years, soaring across the room fast and low and solid, and his weight crushed Burgan’s just as the man’s finger spasmed. There was a wet kind of ripping noise as their bodies collided, as the shot rang out, and there was something hot and wet spreading between them, and there was a fire in Adam’s chest and for a moment, a crazy stupid moment, he thought deliriously _I’ve been shot_ ; he thought _I’m going to die_ ; he thought _I’m already dead_ ; he thought _I’ll never see Jade again_.

But the last proved too much to bear, and so Adam knew he hadn’t been shot, the stagger, the stutter, the pain was something else. Because he had jarred Burgan’s arm; he had rammed, chest-first, into Burgan’s elbow; the revolver’s wicked mouth had slipped, and its body had slammed into Burgan’s jaw, and the bullet had grazed Burgan’s shoulder instead, and that was the hot wet nothing that spread between them, it was blood, Burgan’s blood, but not the blood he’d hoped for; and Burgan was helpless now, crumpled and crying and saying over and over _she’s gone and it never is, it never is_ , and Adam was distantly relieved that he was only being bled on, that it wasn’t brains, because he felt that he wouldn’t be able to handle brains; and he knew what the pain was now, the spreading fire, and he knew why he hadn’t been able to use his left arm, why it had hurt so fucking much when he tried to get it through his shirt sleeve, his jacket; and that was the last thing he knew, because the worst had happened; it was the big one. His heart was done.

End Notes:

Okay, now, tell me what you're thinking, what you thought, what you hated and what you loved. I am insatiable.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	15. Reckoning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one barely made it to you today. So tired. Don't own the boys, this of course never happened, I don't own the poem, it's Don Marquis'.

In the end, they couldn’t find Prof. Carson anywhere. He wasn’t in the dwindling crowd in the opera house, or in the lobby, and no matter how many times Jade tried his cell phone, he wasn’t answering. Looking as exhausted and downtrodden as Davey felt, Jade at last said dully, “Maybe he went back to the hotel”, and Davey gagged a little at the sick, stinging trepidation—he could see it already, Prof. Carson sitting on the end of the great bed, sheets twisted and tangled and reeking of sex all around him, head in his hands, roses wilting.

“The room wasn’t for me,” Davey said quietly, following Jade through the parking lot, vicious wind clawing at his exposed skin. He hadn’t bothered putting on the coat. Jade didn’t say anything, and Davey knew he was right. “The roses weren’t either. He got those for you, didn’t he.”

Jade unlocked the car and slipped wearily into the driver’s seat, saying nothing. Not really knowing what else to do, because damn it, it was cold and dark and he didn’t know his way around Boston and didn’t have the money to take a cab all the way home, to either home, Davey got into the car. They sat there is silence, not really strained so much as deflated, and Davey wondered what he’d ever had to say to Jade. He looked old, very old, in the dim yellow glow from the lamps in the parking lot; in profile, Davey saw crow’s feet, the faintest hint of a sagging jowl, and noticed for the first time the patch at the back of his head where the hair was thin indeed. The pale pink scalp that showed was frighteningly intimate, repelled him; but Davey didn’t wonder why he’d never noticed it before, because he knew it hadn’t been there. Jade hadn’t been so old, before. Jade had had smooth skin, wise but youthful eyes, a quiet, experienced grace but all the passion of a boy Davey’s own age. Jade aged all at once, before Davey’s eyes; and Davey felt the youth flow back into him, so that he felt young again, and the things that weighed upon him were no less heavy, but he felt he had more strength to bear them—felt that, when he was no longer in Jade’s sight, he would still glow, no matter how faint and guttering and stomped on the glow might be.

Davey thought of the people that _did_ love him—thought of Nick and Tabby and their outrage when he’d told them the truth, thought of the kind of friend he’d been to them ever since he heard the name Jade Puget—and thought of his mother, his father, his oppressive little family, and felt a sick tug of homesickness, his younger brother and his grandmother’s cookies and all the demon cousins tearing up the house. Tears sprang to Davey’s eyes, tired tears, and he was already tired of being heartsick, of feeling this huge hole within him, this ache, this deliberate sadness; and he sniffled loudly, and Jade stared fixedly straight ahead, either truly not noticing or kindly pretending not to, and Davey groped around in his bag for something to wipe his nose with.

His hand closed around a crumpled paper, one of many crumpled papers and used tissues and bits of gum wrappers, and for some reason brought it to the surface. He smoothed it out on the dash, squinting at it in the buzzing glow of a passing streetlight. The first thing he saw, almost comical in its looming forbearance, was a neat character, inked in red, each line trim and precise, filling up the corner of the page. It was an F. It was his midterm.

Davey suppressed a laugh, a giddy, hysterical thing, and somewhere in his throat it turned into a sob, and Davey choked on it. His stupid fucking midterm. Jade glanced at him sideways and turned off the car; Davey hadn’t noticed them stop moving, hadn’t realized they’d reached the hotel. He wanted to crumple the paper back up and shove it deeper into his bag, bury the humiliation and the shame and the sick sense of guilt, but he found himself unable. He held the thing in his hands with a twisted kind of reverence, unable to stop his eyes from scanning the opening lines.

“I’m going to check the room,” Jade said, looking at him at last. “Are you okay to wait here?” Davey nodded mutely, not able to tear his eyes from the paper. “I’ll leave the key. Run the heat if you get cold. I should only be a minute.” Davey nodded again, flinching at the blast of cold air and insidious wind that flooded the car when Jade’s door opened. Jade hesitated a moment outside the car, as if there were something else he wanted to say, felt he ought to say, but in the end he only sighed and closed the door.

Davey read the paper, waiting for him. Or at least, tried to read it. It was incoherent, unintelligible, pretentious and dense and failing to make any kind of sense. Every time he thought he’d picked up the thread of it, it leapt again, landing in some new, unrecognizable place; Davey found himself rereading the same lines over and over again without even realizing it. It was populated with words he didn’t remember, knew he had heard but couldn’t define; it was a binge of syllables, but only so much verbose chatter, making nothing, meaning nothing.

Davey’s insides felt syrupy, thick; just slush, nothing solid, nothing that might keep him alive. He opened the door and leaned out just in time—hot, putrid bile splashed across the asphalt, melting snow. Davey’s body continued to contract horribly, dry-heaving, choking and rigid, not breathing, until bile dribbled down his chin, smelling foul, and he could move again, empty inside, nothing left.

In spite of everything, he felt the better for it. He used the paper to wipe his face and dropped it into the lot, wishing he had something to drink; he drew himself back into the car, curled into a ball in the seat, and turned on the heat.

 

 

Adam wasn’t in the hotel room.

Adam wasn’t anywhere.

Jade balled up his fists, gripped by frustration, fury, disgust; he cried out, cursing, and slammed his musician’s hands, once so precious, once so fragile, into the bathroom door. He punched the thing again and again, knowing that the noise would carry through the walls, that he would startle people, unable to stop, punching one-two-three in rapid succession, four-five-six, until he lost count, until he left red-knuckled marks on the heavy cedar door, lipstick kisses. He stopped swinging, then, exhausted as suddenly and thoroughly as he had been gripped by anger, and sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at his torn knuckles, wishing he’d swung harder, wishing his hand had been broken beyond repair, wishing he’d have an excuse, any excuse, to never write a note of music again.

And then it was time to be an adult again, and live with what he’d done; Jade sighed, gathering himself, and stood. He brushed the creases from his pants and went into the bathroom, running his hand under the tap and wrapping it in a washrag, using a towel to wipe his indiscretion from the slightly dented exterior of the bathroom door. No, he hadn’t been able to hit hard enough to break his hand; and he hadn’t been brave or bold enough to immolate; and he hadn’t finished his symphony, and he hadn’t been a wild success, and he hadn’t accomplished anything he’d hoped to, and he hadn’t found Adam. These were facts, and all the temper tantrums in the world wouldn’t change them.

Jade checked himself quickly in the mirror, and he was looking older again, aging quickly now, donning in an evening the wear it had taken long years to accumulate. He’d have to get his glasses out of his bag; even as he looked at himself, the reflection grew less clear, blurring. Jade squeezed his eyes shut ‘til he saw spots, allowing himself a moment, but only one. Then he exited the hotel room, left his key at the front desk, and hurried back to Davey.

The young man looked more like a boy than ever, curled up with his feet on the seat, looking blankly out the window, face set sullenly. His arms were wrapped around his knees and he was small, petulant, lost. “He’s not here,” Jade said, so he’d have something to say, settling in and strapping his seatbelt into place. He paused, hoping Davey would say something, anything. What he’d done to the boy—what he’d done to everyone that mattered in his life—was unconscionable. But he was old, and he was weary, and he was washed-up: he didn’t know what he could do to make it up to anyone.

Jade pulled out of the parking lot. “Back to Amherst, I guess,” he said lamely. It was no use—he couldn’t just sit there in silence next to the kid for two, three hours. Not after all that had passed between them, although even the memories of it seemed lifetimes ago, too far away to touch. He supposed he would have to start by being honest.

“I’m sorry,” Jade said after a long silence, and the words cost him, were hard to pronounce. He was unaccustomed to being the one to voice apology for anything. “This is… for the best.” Jade winced at how canned his words sounded, how cold and clichéd and uncomforting they were. He was not a particularly nurturing man; he had no real need to offer comfort. But Davey looked so pitiful, hunched up in his seat with his face turned away, and the words he’d said were true. Jade had brought him here, had done this to him. He was Jade’s responsibility now.

The next words Jade did not mean to say, or at least had not planned on saying, ever, to anyone. “There was someone else, a man named Robert,” he said, and though the words came out lightly they left him surprising heavy. “It was just phone sex, a petty betrayal, but the point is that I was—I was insatiable, Davey. The time you’ve known me for, I haven’t been… myself. I’ve been trying so hard to be someone else—this bright young burning thing, the person I always imagined I’d be but fell short of. I used you for that—used you to make me feel young and brilliant and strong. And I’m sorry.”

God, but Jade hoped that was enough. He hoped it was over.  
And in the relative silence that followed, Davey shifting but not turning to face him, Jade thought it might be—might be enough. Might be over. He merged onto the expressway that would take them most of the way back to Amherst, and he allowed himself to feel that one small dram of relief that he was due—because he had been honest, damn it. It wasn’t absolution, he knew that, and it wasn’t redemption, but it was something.

When Davey spoke, it was in a voice so young and small that Jade didn’t recognize it at first, barely heard it at all. “So keep using me,” Davey said, and Jade was certain he wasn’t hearing properly, because no one was that stupid—not even Davey was that naive. Who would lay down before a slavering wolf and wave his white, exposed throat beneath its jaws? That kind of demented battering against death was perverse, unnatural.

“Keep using me,” Davey said again, voice stronger now. He sat up straighter, turned his face towards Jade, angles sharp and shadowed, eyes filled with the fierce glitter of reflected headlights. “Stay strong, and brilliant, and young. It would be stupid not to, wouldn’t it? Wasteful, even. Negligent. I want to be used by you—I’m in love with you. And you could learn to love me back, because I can make you beautiful. I can still do that, Jade. You don’t have to do—whatever it is you’re doing. You don’t have to do it.”

Even hearing the words made Jade feel sick. He found himself unable to entertain the thought, even for a moment. The thought of laying a hand on Davey, ever again, made his skin crawl. He couldn’t get the goddamned scherzo out of his head. It just kept echoing through his skull; he was beginning to suspect it would continue doing that forever, that he was damned and doomed, that he had licked the stamp himself and neatly penned Hell’s address on his own forehead.

Jade realized all at once what Davey’s breed of demented determination, bashing his head in on death’s door trying to persuade the thing to open, reminded him of. It was moths, of course; moths desperately battering themselves against buzzing bulbs, dusty wings scorching, so furiously seeking an open flame to immolate upon. And wasn’t there a poem that said as much?

Yes—and something other than his symphony pooled into his brain, and he was unspeakably grateful—there was a poem about a moth, and the moth said

 

 

_it is better to be a part of beauty_  
for one instant and then cease to  
exist than to exist forever  
and never be a part of beauty

 

 

and for so long now, for _months_ now, Jade had believed it. Jade had said it. Jade had screamed ‘til he was hoarse: longevity is only the consolation prize for passion. It is better to know one firebrand moment of ecstasy and shrivel into ash than to live a long life of moderate misery, moderate happiness. Of course, he knew better now. He had flung himself into the fire and burned up, and his last word was Adam’s name, his last thought was Adam’s name, his last breath was Adam’s name—not once while he burned alive had he spared a thought for Davey. Not for one second since he’d heard the notes his own misbegotten affair turn sour in the air had he been glad to have done it, to have experienced it. The kindest thing he could say was that he was leaving the scherzo in the symphony—that it was shit, and that he would suffer it to remain, because in its blood-bright, tinny falsehood it was every bit as true as all the rest: he had done it. He was fallible. It had happened.

What was happening here, Jade realized, was Davey confusing himself for the moth.

“Davey,” Jade said softly, kindly, trying to be gentle. “You don’t understand. I’m the moth.”

Davey stared at him blankly, saying without so many words that what he was spouting, what was coming out of his mouth, was gibberish. Jade went on, as best he could. “Or at least—I thought I was. I _fancied_ myself as the moth. I romanticized it, of course. But I’m not, I’ve never been, your flame. I’ve been your moth, blinded by your beauty, burning myself alive. Does that... does that make sense?”

Davey shook his head wordlessly, eyes hard, dark accusations gleaming in a stony face.

Jade sighed, for the nth time that evening. Young people, honestly; they were impossible. “At the end of the poem,” Jade went on, seemingly unable to frame his thoughts in any sensible manner, “the cockroach says ‘but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself’. And that was me, I think. I read your paper, that first paper, and I felt like—I felt like you were what I had been missing from my life, like your spark and your fire were everything I had lost, everything I’d been mourning. If we’re to be honest, I’m a—a failed composer. Hadn’t written anything in ten years, dropped out of my last contract in disgrace, and instead of moving on or—or— _improving_ myself in any way, I just sat around all day and stewed in it, and tortured myself, and tortured Adam when I couldn’t draw enough blood from my own arm to satisfy. And so I wanted you. I wanted to incinerate myself in you. I wanted to _become_ you.” Davey was still just staring, a faint look of disgust on his face, his lips slightly parted. Jade’s hand gestures grew larger, trying desperately to articulate the futility and listlessness of his long, embittered life, trying to spell out in words what he’d failed so brilliantly to get down in music.

“And this whole time,” Jade said, drawing the pieces together now for himself as much as Davey, “this whole time, we _both_ thought we were moths. If I was, if I really was, I wouldn’t be here, driving home, chasing Adam—” he paused there, his voice catching, a painful lump in his throat— “chasing all the same, boring shit I’ve had and not appreciated for 30 years. If I were a moth, I’d have thrown myself into the fire, bowed and eaten up their praise and taken you to the hotel and—and taken things from you, things I don’t deserve, things I’ve already had my shot at. I’d have laid you on the bed and cut you open and gorged on your heart until I was sick with it, and I would have been fat and oblivious and euphoric, and—”

Jade stopped abruptly, glancing over at Davey’s face. The boy’s eyes were wide with horror, with disgust, and Jade couldn’t help wanting to shake him, just a little. “Not literal heart-eating,” he said, with the absolute minimum amount of disparagement he could manage. “Not literally fucking cutting you open and eating you. That’s disgusting. No, I just mean—” Before he could get any more words out, the incredulity of the situation, of his statement, caught up with him. It was the wrong moment for it—it was the _worst_ moment for it—but suddenly Jade found himself chuckling, and then it was all-out laughter, and tears were in his eyes and he was howling, couldn’t control himself, couldn’t stop, because it was all just too funny—him, sitting here, driving them back to Amherst, back to Adam, arguing with Davey about which of them filled the role of the moth in this particular metaphor, trying to explain himself in snippets of a half-remembered poem, and then asserting, then finding himself in a situation where it was _necessary_ to assert, _no, Davey, I’m not actually a cannibal, I have no intention of eating your heart_. It was all too much. So Jade laughed, as loudly and as long as he pleased, ‘til tears ran down his cheeks and, really, he was a hazard to the other drivers, a veritable menace, and it was nearing catharsis when he realized that, beside him, Davey was laughing too.

 

 

Adam had died forty minutes previously, but he didn’t feel much different. He had read somewhere—in an oncology journal, actually, if he remembered correctly, though he certainly couldn’t recall what he’d been doing with one of those—that hearing was the last sense to go, when you died; that your mouth would fill up with blood and salt and stone, and your vision would fade to black as the optic nerve stopped responding, and you’d see a white light but only if the paramedics shone one in your eyes, testing your pupils for dilation; that when there was almost nothing of you left, in your last precious seconds when you could no longer feel the hands moving over your dying form, you’d still be hearing the sounds, the voices slowly dulling, and whatever annoying jingle happened to be on the radio would be the last thing you ever knew. The oncology journal was less clear on what would happen after that.

Well, his mouth had filled with nothing, with the taste of ever-after, and the pain hadn’t ceased so much as he had felt himself drift away, pull free from it. He’d seen the horror and fear and madness in Burgan’s eyes, and the fresh bruise blooming on his jaw, and gotten a really detailed final glance at the grain of the hardwood floor, and then he hadn’t seen anything anymore. He’d heard Burgan’s voice, speaking to him or someone else (it hadn’t seemed terribly important, at the time), and then he hadn’t heard anything, and that was it: he was dead.

It hadn’t felt like anything. It had been warm, in a way, and restful; the first thing he felt when they brought him back, before the bursting, before the pain, was a sleepy reluctance— _no, put me back, leave me be_. And it had been hard to shake off, that grogginess; he had struggled with it, eyes heavy, chest knifed through with the most awful—feeling laid bare, cut open, flayed and lacerated—like lines of fire worming, burrowing, hooks through his flesh—

And then there had been morphine, and he hadn’t had to struggle anymore, and there appeared a mask that did his breathing for him, and they had let him go back to sleep. It wasn’t the same, of course. He woke up feeling like he’d spent a lifetime running marathons. He’d never been so beaten or so flogged. There was more morphine in his veins than blood: he couldn’t speak intelligibly, couldn’t lift his head, but still somehow the pain got through and dominated his existence. Time passed; he slept, or something like it, and he woke again, a little stronger, a little more alive, closer to this world than the next, which he hadn’t been, before.

There was a woman at his bedside, peering at screens and meters, fiddling with tubes, and when his eyes came open she was the one who told him he’d been dead. _The degree of oxygen deprivation implies you were dead for three or four minutes before the defibrillator brought you back._ He wanted to tell her she was wrong—it had been much longer than that, he was sure of it, because he felt that he’d been dragged such a distance, that he’d been somewhere so very far away—but when he tried to speak, he produced more drool than sound. That worried him—oxygen deprivation to the brain commonly led to aphasia—but the nurse kept speaking, telling him that Burgan hadn’t stopped performing CPR until the paramedics pulled him off Adam’s body, though the chest compressions must have been dreadful to administer with the bullet wound in his shoulder, and that his brain scans looked good, like Burgan had kept oxygen circulating in his dead veins just enough to buy him some extra time. They wouldn’t know anything for sure for some time yet, she told him, but his chances for recovery were strong, and also, she added as a side note, in just a few moments he’d go under again, this time to be outfitted with a pacemaker to replace the quickly-draining battery of his heart. And then she did something with the tubes and a rush of heat swept up his arm, and Adam, who had died forty minutes earlier and had yet to feel any different, closed his eyes once more.

 

 

Jade pulled up to the curb gracelessly, drained by the day’s seemingly endless revelations and dramas and ready to collapse into bed, dreading the conversation with Adam yet to come. He wondered briefly if he’d be allowed to postpone it, to shake his head and say “we’ll do this tomorrow”, and fall asleep with his head on Adam’s chest, his ear full of Adam’s heartbeat.

It seemed unlikely. Indeed, not even Davey was cooperating; for example, Jade had arrived at the curb and come to a complete stop at least 20 seconds ago, but Davey was still in the car, slumped impotently in his seat. Jade didn’t think he was asleep, but with his face turned away it was impossible to tell. Jade didn’t want to speak to him—didn’t want to invite conversation or imply that there was closure to be had—but the longer he sat there idling, imagining his head hitting a pillow at last, the harder it was not to bodily shove Davey out of the car and into the slush at the curb.

“Davey?” he asked softly. “We’re here.”

Davey turned his head sharply, eyes large and furious and full of tears, and Jade gave in, Jade was defeated. Clearly they were having one more go-round before he was allowed to rest.

“You’re making a mistake,” Davey said, sounding devastatingly certain. Unable to hold his head up, Jade dropped his forehead onto the steering wheel and turned his face toward Davey.

“Jesus, you can’t just let people _do_ this to you,” Jade said. It was unusually difficult to keep his eyes open. “All right? People like me are toxic, and you can’t just let us take advantage of you—you can’t let us get inside you and tear you up like this.”

“I’m not torn up,” Davey said stubbornly, chin jutting proud.

Jade wanted to strangle him. “Do you have any idea how fucked up it is, how fucked up _you_ must be, that you’re sitting here begging me to destroy you? You’re too young for this.”

Davey’s eyes sharpened. “Is that why?” he asked, voice a hissing little thing. “Is it because I’m young? Because I can—if I dropped out, we could—”

“I don’t love you!” Jade cried, at his wit’s end, and it was too hard, too forceful, and Davey was shocked into silence and the tears began to spill over onto his smooth, unlined cheeks, and Jade was despicable, Jade was self-loathing, Jade was done. “I’m sorry. I haven’t ended a relationship in over 30 years, I don’t know how to do it gently. Just—this never should have happened, and it’s finished now, and I don’t want to see you again.”

Even as he said the words, Jade knew he shouldn’t be saying them, not quite like that—he should be more apologetic, he should explain himself, he certainly owed Davey an explanation—but he had nothing left, damn it. He had lost everything tonight, and before he was finally allowed to rest, he’d have to lose everything else.

Davey was speaking, sounding like the child he was, ranting and almost yelling and Jade’s eyes fluttered closed and he didn’t care about anything, anymore, needed to find Adam, needed to sleep, needed to—

Jade’s phone went off in his pocket, and he had just enough presence of mind left to answer it. He shot Davey a scathing _shut the hell up_ glare and, not caring not caring not _caring_ anymore. “Hello?” he said, expending what was surely the last of his energy.

It was a woman, a hysterically sobbing woman. Davey sat sullenly, his arms crossed over his chest, apparently not finished with his petulant rampage. “Hello?” Jade repeated.

Finally she got a word out, but it was not a helpful one. “Jade,” she choked out, apparently not aware that his name was the one piece of information he _did_ have. “Oh, Jade!”

Jade cast a sidelong glance at Davey, who was still staring straight ahead. “Uh,” Jade said, holding out the phone. “Can you read this? It’s so dark in here that I can’t—”

Davey rolled his eyes. “It says it’s Mellie,” he said caustically. “Are you sleeping with her too?”

Jade ignored him. “Calm down, Mellie,” he said into the phone. Part of him—most of him—wanted to hang up on her. He had enough on his plate. He had to find Adam. He didn’t have time for this. “What happened?”

“Hunter—he tried to—he shot himself,” she sobbed, and suddenly Jade was sitting bolt upright, Jade was energized, Jade was alive.

“Where are you?” he asked, not hesitating. “I’m on my way.”

But Mellie wasn’t done. “Adam—Adam—” she managed next. Everything inside of Jade was plunged into ice. He couldn’t breathe—his intestines were sick, slithering knots—oh god, oh god, oh god, Adam _what_? “Adam what, Mellie?” Jade asked, too sharply, but he couldn’t help it, he was panicking, he was fearing, he was _knowing_ the worst.

“Adam tackled him,” she eked out, and a fresh wave of sobs swept over her, and Jade was frozen, couldn’t move, because he knew there was more. “And his—his heart—ohhhh, Jade,” she moaned, and then she was sobbing again, and Jade was—Jade was what?

Jade was desperation. Jade was panic.

 

 

Davey got out of the car wordlessly. It was a fight he didn’t have energy for, suddenly—a fight he wasn’t interested in after all. Besides, he wasn’t trying to convince Jade of anything—not really. He knew that the man had made up his mind, had finally, fatally, decided, and he wasn’t all that certain he wanted to change it. Yes—he loved Jade, more than his heart should ever have allowed him to. And yes, he had given up everything. But Jade had never been really his; Jade had always belonged to Prof. Carson and a world of make-believe and dream logic, one in which Davey could dress up as something he wasn’t and prettily play the part, one in which Jade could do the same. In the end, it wasn’t them; in the end, it never had been.

Davey felt all the weariness, now, that he had ever felt; but he also felt human, painfully so. Jade cried out, his eyes wide and his voice breaking, and Davey knew that nothing Jade had ever felt for him was as real as that, was as real as the anguish or the tears that now wound their way down his paper-thin cheeks, red with cold, blue with blood.

Jade didn’t notice him leaving, even, until he was already on the curb, until he had the car door in hand and was ready to swing but hesitated, not quite able, never quite able. It was then that Jade looked up, suddenly, eyes still wide and white and red, tears flowing without restraint, and saw him.

“It’s Adam,” Jade said in a hoarse voice, a voice raw with a depth of emotion that even Davey, his most devout, had ever suspected he possessed. “I—I am sorry.”

For once, though, Davey didn’t want to hear a goddamn thing Jade Puget had to say. Those two words— _it’s Adam_ —they were sufficient. They explained everything.

“I know,” Davey said wearily, unable to hold onto the pretense of his outrage any longer. “Go,” he added, a jerk of his head, pushing the door gently so it swung shut. Jade stared at him a moment longer, almost beseeching in his evident terror, and Davey knew he didn’t want to be alone, didn’t know how to be alone, but didn’t want Davey with him either. “Go on, go,” Davey said more loudly, flapping a hand now. Whatever it was that had happened, Davey was surprised to find he didn’t wish Prof. Carson ill—or at least, not much ill. (Maybe just a nominal amount of suffering.)

Jade nodded, then, and fixed his eyes ahead. Davey watched him drive away, bag weighing heavy on his shoulder but heart astonishingly light. Davey trudged up the icy steps of his dorm slowly, still shell-shocked, still reeling, still lost, but feeling in a small, quiet way that perhaps, perhaps, he’d come out of this okay.

End Notes:

Consider this a part one; I didn't get to finish what I'd hoped to. More next week.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	16. Fallout

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own the boys, and none of this ever happened. If I'm to be honest with you, I'm still not sure exactly how this is going to end, even though I've got less than a week to decide. Read on, and I hope you enjoy it!

When Adam woke up again, the pain he’d been living with for a month, now, was gone. It didn’t immediately occur to him as an absence of pain; it hit him first as panic, and it was a relief when he clutched at the spot where his heart should be and awoke a blaze, in both the tugged IV at his wrist and the fresh fiery sutures ‘round his heart. What he felt next, palm pressed flat to feel his heartbeats—because honestly, the first thing he’d thought when he hadn’t felt the pain was that his heart, too, must be gone—was a rectangle, hard and unyielding, sewn in beneath the skin. This, too, was horrifying. He scrabbled at it, not caring about the pain from the tender torn-open skin, breathing hard, _oh god oh god oh god, there’s something_ in _me_ , and a hand fell on his arm, soothing.

He looked up, first at the hand, then the arm, then the woman at the end of it, pale-faced and quivering but smiling in a thin, exhausted way. It was Melanie.  
For the first time he thought of Burgan, wondered what was wrong with him, wondered if it was fixed, now, the way his pain had been, torn out and replaced with a—with a hard, rectangular whatever-this-was under the skin. Adam wondered where the man whose life he’d saved, who’d saved his life, was now; and it seemed strange to him that he didn’t know, didn’t simply _know_ , after what they’d been through. Melanie was here, though: that meant Burgan was close. Adam didn’t know if the thought alarmed or comforted him, but there was a lot Adam didn’t know right now. The world was fuzzy, there was a box in his chest, _under his skin_ , and everything seemed awful and tinny and strange, and Melanie was at his bedside touching his arm with her cold fingers, and Jade wasn’t there. The thought made his guts clench up, his limping heart girding itself against the sting, and it wasn’t comfortable, but it was a different kind of pain—a sharp, wincing thing, like putting weight on a pulled muscle. That was exactly what it was. The beeping of the heart monitor quickened as he thought of Jade, and a look of concern crossed Melanie’s already weathered brow, and he took the deepest breath his scorched lungs were able, pushing the thought from his mind.

“It’s just the Pacemaker,” Melanie said, shifting her grip from his wrist to entwine her fingers in his, to keep him from pulling at the stitches. “It will feel and look a little strange, but you’ll get used to it.” She paused, not sure if she should say it, and then added, “My father got one a few years ago. He was hysterical when he came to and found it there, inside him. But he doesn’t even notice it anymore.” She wanted to be comforting, Adam recognized and appreciated, but was careful not to make him feel old. He wondered how much of that had to do with Burgan’s breakdown, how much she knew, and because he couldn’t think about Jade and Jade was his whole world, he asked about the only other thing he had in his life just then.

“How is he?” he asked, and was pleased that the words came out, hoarse and mangled and barely audible, hardly words at all, but still whole and intelligible. The nurse who had told him about the brain scans hadn’t lied. Burgan had saved him. Thank god: Adam had lived with Jade long enough to know there were fates worse than death, there was trapped and useless and vegetative and that it would be better to be dead than that kind of burden, and he wondered who the burden would fall to. His sister? Her children? No: it was too terrible to think about. He repeated himself, simply to affirm that he was able: “Hunter. Is he here?”

Melanie wanted to answer the easier question first, the one that was least painful, but at the end couldn’t decide which it was. Even with the morphine, Adam saw this; he had been in a position before, asked about Jade, when he couldn’t decide which answer would hurt less, would be less embarrassing. And he knew he’d be in that position again, possibly forever. _Where’s Jade? What happened?_

“Yes, he—I mean, the doctors say—” Melanie sighed, looking older than she was, looking withered and ancient even with a distended belly, full of life. “His shoulder is stitched up. Nothing serious. But the rest of him… He’s in the psychiatric wing,” Melanie said at last, looking away. Adam ached for her, squeezed her hand, wished he could do more. It was getting hard to keep his eyes open, but he didn’t want to sleep again, not yet. It was too tempting—he didn’t want to yield. He might spend his whole life sleeping, chasing that fuller, deeper sleep he’d known for a moment or two, for an interrupted eternity. It seemed important to stay awake, to hear Melanie’s story and deal with it, not to give in and sleep and hide, no matter how much he wanted to—maybe _because_ he wanted to.

Melanie looked down at their laced hands in numb surprise, as if she’d forgotten there was a physical world. Adam knew that feeling too. When you were in a place like this—when you were feeling what Melanie was, or anything like it—you forgot that anything could touch you. You forgot that you were tangible at all.

“There’s something very wrong with him,” she said, face crumpling, voice trembling. Her lips twisted up horribly and she turned her face away, wiping at it with her hand, trying to smooth in back into place. It was terrible to watch her cry, huge and pregnant and beautiful, once so happy, always so kind. Adam had forgotten how terrible it was to watch a woman cry. Her face contorted in the worst kind of pain, her eyes filling with wet and her breath hitching, and she was miserable, not wanting to, not meaning to break down. She gasped for air, loudly, and Adam knew she was embarrassed. He squeezed her hand again, the only thing he could do.

“I should have seen it,” she said at a whisper, fighting to keep her face taut, chin quivering. “I—I should have—” Her tears were falling now, and Adam’s new heart ached. He was glad to have her pain here with him, subsuming, so much bigger than his own. There was no room for his own suffering here with Melanie, breaking open, who was living through so much worse.

Melanie leaned forward, hiding her face in her two hands and Adam’s one, unable to hold back the rain. “I did see it,” she said, moaning a little, tears and vibrations falling on Adam’s skin, and he was glad that he could feel it, glad he was alive. This was a relief: he’d been waiting to feel it, this gladness, and it hadn’t come until this moment. He’d been worried it wouldn’t come at all.

“That’s why I left,” Melanie was saying. “I saw it, and it scared me, and I thought—I thought it would just—did I always know? Was it always there? And just now, with Alexander, I ran away? I—you don’t do that to the people you love,” she moaned, rocking back and forth now, the motion pulling at the raw skin around the IV, but Adam found he didn’t mind the pain, because feeling pain was part of living, and he was so newly glad to find himself doing that.

“What if Alexander—” Melanie started, and then stopped, tears overwhelming her at last, and she sobbed salt and snot all over Adam’s hand, and he reached his other arm to touch her shoulder, to rub circles on her back, not sure if he should tell her that that’s what Burgan had worried too, that that was why—that that was _part_ of why—the man had snapped. But no: that wouldn’t help.

“Alexander will be beautiful and healthy,” he said instead, because this was a better thing to say, kinder. “Your whole family is going to be healthy. They’ll help him. They’ll bring him back. They’ll find what’s broken and—and they’ll give him a pill, or flip a switch, and nothing like this will ever happen again.” It felt good to speak the words, to declare them, to believe them. Of course, he couldn’t promise them; of course they might not be true. But maxims were comforting to utter, and comforting to hear, so he kept speaking them. “He loves you so much, Melanie. He’ll come back to you.” The maxims failed him there, and Adam wondered if it was true. Because hadn’t she done something unforgivable? Hadn’t she left him, pregnant with his child, to his own madness? Hadn’t she taken away everything he loved—hadn’t she betrayed him and left him all alone when he was weakest, sickest? Hadn’t she deceived him? Hadn’t she broken promises?

How could he forgive that? Who could _expect_ him to forgive that? He had loved her with his all, with his everything, and she had just run off like his years of devotion and support all meant nothing, and he had fallen apart, and who was at his bedside now? She wasn’t. She was off with some other man when he was—

He wasn’t thinking about Melanie anymore, nor Burgan. The shrill cry of the heart rate monitor rose and the new plastic box fought his struggling heart, tried to subdue it with measured electric currents. Adam wondered distantly about changing its batteries. Adam wondered how he would know the batteries were getting low—if it would be like a smoke detector or would simply whisper out of function. He wondered how often he’d be back here, cut open along the same lines and sewed up again, wondered if they’d install a zipper. He wondered these things because they were easy to wonder, or easier at least than the real question, the big question, the one he couldn’t answer—

Would he forgive Jade? How could he?

 

 

This time he didn’t wake up, really, because he wasn’t aware he’d slept. He opened his eyes, thinking that he’d closed them only a moment before, to find the room dark, moonlight cutting stripes across his blanket through the blinds, the chair at his bedside empty. The only trace of Melanie was her smell, light and flowery and faint through the ammonia, through the piss, through the _death_ , and a Mylar balloon, chrome and crinkling, seeming vulgar, somehow obscene, catching the weak moonlight and refracting watery shapes on the ceiling, on the walls.

It was late, obviously, the light told him that much; but Adam felt more wide awake than he had yet in this new lifetime. He couldn’t say why, exactly. His eyes buzzed sharply around the room, searching for the source of the electricity in his limbs, wondering if it was just the Pacemaker’s spark that made him feel so alert, so alive. They landed on his suit, hanging carefully from the back of the bathroom door, and felt the urge to touch the fabric, see if he could feel the traces of his old self still on it, see if they had sent it out for dry cleaning or if it was still crusted with Burgan’s blood.

Adam wheeled his myriad apparatuses over with him, wincing when the IV stand squeaked, hoping the cord that connected the heart monitor to the wall would be long enough. It was, but only just: he’d have to get a nurse to unhook him if he wanted to piss properly, by himself, which he found he did. His body was weak; the effort he expended crossing the room told him that much, and he was not entirely comforted by the weight he was putting on the IV stand. Still, he reached the bathroom, and stroked the hand not white-knuckling the stand along the fabric, searching for the telltale stiffness that would mean Burgan’s blood. What he found first, however, was a rift: a long jagged cut through the back, splitting seams and baring silk lining, the jacket hanging in two imperfect halves, casting separate shadows. He was at once horrified: his beautiful tux, his _only_ tux, that had born him through every formal event of the last fifteen years, destroyed! He’d never afford a new one. But it seemed fitting, too, cathartic; it was right, somehow, that it should be cut from him, that his clothing, his first life, should be stripped from him like outlived skin, that he should burst from it wet and new and gasping ferric air.

He dropped his hand from the ruined jacket, not sure if it was beautiful or sad, not entertaining the idea that it was both, because he was a man of absolutes tonight, intolerant of shades of grey. At the last moment he remembered the letter, the other letter, that he had tucked into the inside pocket a lifetime ago, the letter so long forgotten. He wondered if he should open it or lay it to rest with the tux and so much else, but his fingers had closed around the stiff, creamy envelope before he’d decided. He pressed the letter to his chest, over the hard plastic rectangle of his new heartbeat, and limped back over to the bed. The balloon twinkled merrily at him as he sat heavily back on the bed, finding himself out of breath, limbs quaking. He was not as strong, then, as he’d like to be; not as strong or sharp as his mind felt. His body folded up, giving out, and he was glad to sink back into the sour-smelling hospital pillows, grateful to the warmth the scratchy, haltingly arranged blankets provided as he settled them over his legs. He laid back with the envelope still pressed to his chest and was tempted to close his eyes, just for a moment, but had fallen for that trick before and wouldn’t be taken in.

Adam found his wire frames at his bedside, atop a book, some generic bestseller that Melanie had probably chosen with great care from the gift shop. There was no end to that woman’s sweetness, he reflected, though she’d probably been desperate to keep her mind off things, Alexander kicking and Burgan shut up in some white room. Adam slipped the glasses over his aquiline nose and gave his eyes a moment to adjust before he broke the letter’s seal, hoping that this one bore better news than the last.

It did. Adam read the words once, and then again, and let the letter drop from trembling hands onto his lap, stared at the refracted moonlight in the ceiling in wonder. Burgan had done it. All the things he’d said about being Adam’s friend, about helping him—he’d meant them. He’d really done it. Adam blinked rapidly, expecting tears to well in his eyes again, but they did not come. Adam read the letter a final time, fingers brushing the ever-so-slightly raised letters in disbelief, bumping over the real ink signature, the grand loops of a capital E, the nautilus sweep of the C.

 

_Professor Carson,_

_On behalf of the Amherst College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I am honored to invite you to join us as a permanent faculty member, with full professorship and all its benefits. You have been chosen to fill a vaunted tenure position in the History department, and it is with high hopes and great expectations I implore you to join our fellowship and accept this honor.  
We eagerly await your acquiescence. Please contact my office with any questions you might have, and see attached for details on benefits, salary, housing allowances, etc. In the meantime, enjoy the holidays._

_Emile Cole_  
Chairman of the Board  
Amherst College of LAS 

 

He let a smile sweep his face, unabashed, and carefully returned the letter to his envelope. He couldn’t wait to tell Burgan, whatever state he might find the man in. He couldn’t wait to tell—

Well. Perhaps it had taken a cataclysm, but Adam couldn’t help but feel that his life was getting back on track. True, he’d be spending much of his remaining days in and out of a hospital, meeting specialists and popping Coumadin, shaking hands and going under so they could unzip his chest and replace his batteries—he was imaging the little ones that twisted and jumped in your hand, the watch size batteries that cost so much and would never go into their damned slots—like he was the Bionic Man; and true, he’d have to deal with Jade, with everything, soon enough. But for now, he let himself feel happy, and fulfilled, comforted by the steady beating of his heart.

 

 

Jade just barely made it to the gift shop in time. That seemed urgent, somehow—like something Adam would do, getting to the gift shop, remembering to bring flowers. He felt ridiculous, of course, running in as the girl was flipping the lights, locking the doors, and grabbing the least-wilted bouquet that there was left—nothing grand like Adam would have winked and charmed his way into, not like what Adam would have procured in a way that seemed effortless but, apparently, required much thought and foresight and care, because this limp handful of browning daisies and baby’s breath was nothing like the supernova display of lilies Adam had brought when he’d had a kidney stone, nothing like the bloody explosion of fresh-cut, rain-drenched poppies Adam had brought into his hospital room and laid out on newspaper with a goofy grin on his face when Jade had had his appendix removed twenty years ago—apparently none of those flowers had come from hospital gift shops, apparently Adam had gone above and beyond all semblance of prepackaged sentiment and, fuck, he’d probably picked the goddamn poppies himself, Jade had never thought of that before, had never taken the time to wonder where the hell he’d found flowers that still had raindrops on the goddamn petals—

It was embarrassing, buying the flowers, fumbling for his wallet and his heart and thinking of Adam and suffocating, and suddenly bowing his head and choking on a tiny, regretful sob—what an idiot he’d been, all these years, what a fool—and it was even more embarrassing when the girl looked at him, wary and empathetic, and the paltry state of his offering, of his grand fucking gesture, paled until it was an embarrassment itself, and he grabbed the first stuffed animal he laid eyes on, trying pathetically to bolster his gift, to make it meaningful, to make it worthy of Adam, and then in the elevator even at this time of night he saw weary looking family members, ones who weren’t new to this, and night nurses and harried residents, and all he could do was clutch his pathetic daisies and the ridiculous stuffed crocodile with its manic leer and the bright red embroidered heart it held in its scaly claws, and—

He wanted to stuff the crocodile in the first garbage bin he came across after that, realizing that it was leering and digging its claws into Adam’s stuttering heart, wanting to take a bite, just like him, why oh why would he pick _that_ stuffed animal, why did he think _any_ stuffed animal would help, but he couldn’t bin the crocodile without binning the daisies too, and he didn’t want to go up empty handed, didn’t want to stand before Adam alone. The daisies, the crocodile, they didn’t help his case when he reached the cardiac ward and went to the front desk, because the nurse sitting behind it took one look at him and said “No, I’m sorry, visiting hours are over”, but the look on his face and his rumpled tux and maybe the desperate thing in his eyes, they somehow swayed her, because all he said was “Please” and she sighed and said “All right” and looked up the number of Adam’s room for him, and Jade was glad, because he wasn’t able to say that the man he loved had _died_ , could still be dying, could be dead, and he wouldn’t know for sure that he was still breathing until he watched the great chest rise and fall, rise and fall—

And when he got to Adam’s room, that’s the first thing he did. Before he even went in Jade stood there, at the window, staring hard into the shadows at Adam’s chest, and for a horrible second, minute, hour, it seemed like Adam’s chest wasn’t moving at all, that there’d been some terrible mistake and the doctors hadn’t noticed and—but then he saw it, he saw the chest move, and he dared then to look at Adam’s face, and it was—Adam was smiling. Adam was smiling in his sleep, here on the worst night of Jade’s entire life, Adam was smiling on his deathbed in his sleep, and Jade was rooted to the spot, unable to tear his eyes from it, that most beloved smile, and he stood in the hallway until the sun began to climb into sight outside, slices of sunrise falling across Adam’s gloriously rising, breathing, living chest, and he stared through the window, and he wanted nothing more than to touch Adam, to hold Adam, to feel his skin and listen to his heartbeat and, yes, fall asleep with his head on that indomitable chest, but he didn’t, couldn’t move, and when Adam began to stir he found himself turning, turning away, walking quickly, back down the twisting corridor and past the nurses’ station, stuffing the crocodile and the daisies into the first garbage bin he passed after all, bursting into the stairwell and gasping for fucking air and running, running at full tilt down the stairs and stairs and stairs, and across the lobby and out the big glass doors, out into the parking lot, bloody with sun, sanguine splashes of it across every idle car, and he got into Adam’s Buick and inhaled deeply, trying to catch Adam’s smell, and started the car and drove, as far away, as _fast_ away, as the forsaken old thing would take him.

 

 

Melanie signed his discharge papers with a watery smile, wringing her hands and saying “I called him as soon as I heard, I don’t know why he hasn’t come”, and Adam wasn’t sure how he felt about that, about Jade not coming. Jade hadn’t come to see if he was all right, hadn’t come to see him at all, and now, three nights later, he was being released; and Jade wasn’t there to take him home, to take care of him, and he didn’t know how he felt about it at all. On one hand, he was grateful—on one hand he was certain that if Jade had dared to show his fucking face in his hospital room he would have given himself another heart attack screaming: _get out, get out_. And part of him, of course, didn’t want Jade to see him like this—didn’t want the Jade of thirty years or the Jade of fresh betrayal to see him this way, chest bandaged, chest bumping out in an alien rectangle, didn’t want Jade to be the one to check his stitches or push his wheelchair or help him into his clothes.

Yet another part of him wondered _why_ Jade hadn’t come. Had Jade left him, then, so thoroughly that he didn’t care what became of Adam—so thoroughly that there was no need, even, to say he’d left? Because how could Jade know that Adam knew—how could Jade know to bury his face of shame, how could Jade know to hide?

So it was Melanie who signed his papers, Melanie who pushed his wheelchair, Melanie who, bless her, in spite of everything had driven to his house for sweatpants and a sweater, clean clothes he could wear home, Melanie who had shaken her head sadly and answered the question he’d been to proud to ask: no, Jade hadn’t been at the house when she went, god only knew where Jade was at by now—Adam was thinking Brazil, maybe, though he doubted Jade would like it there.

The first thing he did as a free man, papers signed, was stop Melanie, planet-like in her late pregnancy, from pushing his wheelchair. “You can’t do it yourself,” she protested. “The stitches!” So Adam hailed an orderly and, when Melanie told him which parking lot she was in, Adam interrupted.

“I want to see Hunter,” he said, steeling himself against Melanie’s little gasp, the tears that sprang so instantly to her sea glass eyes.

“That’s not the best idea,” she protested weakly, gathering herself. “He isn’t… himself.”

Adam expected him psychotic, frothing at the mouth, possibly in a straightjacket, certainly muttering gibberish, perhaps violent. As he was wheeled through the ward, past a surprisingly quiet, morose smattering of psychopaths and suicides, he braced himself for this, the psych inmate he’d seen in thousand television shows and movies, preparing for what he thought would be the worst.

That wouldn’t have been the worst.

Burgan was sitting quietly on the edge of his bed, staring down at his hands, folded in his lap. He was wearing corduroys, a blue tweed sweater with suede patches on the elbows, precisely tied brown leather Oxfords. His face was pale, the stubble on his head and face dark and longer than Adam had ever seen it—realizing belatedly, of course, that he wouldn’t be allowed to have a razor. His arm was in a loose sling and medical tape and the corner of a white bandage were just visible at his neck, disappearing under the sweater’s collar to bind his shoulder. His jaw was colored with a sickly greenish bruise, where the gun had hit him.

Melanie hung back in the doorway, but the orderly pushed Adam all the way to the edge of the bed. Had he been propelling himself, he wouldn’t have gotten as close—at a few paces off, some kind of deep horror gripped him, and every part of his self screamed that he ought go no nearer. But it wasn’t up to him; the orderly parked him close enough that his knees were nearly flush with Burgan’s, and Adam was swallowing hard, trying to gather the wits to speak, when Burgan suddenly looked up.

The once sharp, keen eyes did not glitter, did not shine; they were dull, empty, nothing fierce or unsettling about them, and that itself was disconcerting. They were placid, the surface of a lake, and not the electric stinging blue Adam remembered. The corner of Burgan’s mouth was smudged with drool, a tiny amount, and when his eyes settled at length on Adam’s face, the lips twitched into an empty little smile.

“Adam,” Burgan said in a tinny voice, and Adam realized he’d been expected the man not to remember him—to be brain dead, a vegetable, though he’d suffered no mental injury. It was just something about his eyes that made Adam expect all traces of Burgan to be gone. “How kind of you to visit. I’m told that I owe you a great debt.”

Adam bravely put a hand on Burgan’s knee, though everything in him recoiled from the touch. He expected the leg, too, to be cold and dead, devoid of life, but it was not: the corduroy was warm, the flesh inside it soft and living. “And I you,” he answered gravely, unable to force cheer in the presence of Burgan’s somber deadness.

Suddenly Burgan’s eyes shone faintly, and he gripped Adam’s shoulder with his uninjured arm. Adam jerked back from the touch, but Burgan’s fingers were tipped with steel, unyielding. “I have to stay here,” Burgan said urgently, hoarsely. “This isn’t—I don’t—I don’t feel anything. It’s the only way. It’s the only way. I can’t go home.”

Adam looked uncertainly to Melanie, but her face was turned away, her hand over her mouth. Burgan’s grip loosened and his face went slack again, as if it had been a momentary indiscretion, as if it hadn’t been at all.

“When are they discharging him?” Adam asked her, because Burgan was back to staring at his hands, the visit concluded.

Melanie’s eyes were bright with tears. “Yesterday,” she said, sotto voce. “You heard him. He won’t come home.”

 

 

It took a few days to work up the courage, and Jade wasn’t proud of that.

The first night, he drove aimlessly, trying to keep his eyes open. He couldn’t go back to the hospital, couldn’t see Adam like that, _his_ Adam like that, couldn’t break Adam’s heart all over again with his awful truths—he wasn’t brave enough. After all this time, he wasn’t brave enough to stand at Adam’s side when Adam needed him most, and he wasn’t proud; he was ill. He couldn’t go back to the house, either, because that was at once place full of Adam and a place that would seem strangled and suffocated and choked without him there. What Jade thought to himself was, _I have nowhere else to go_ , but that wasn’t true. Mellie kept calling, leaving messages he couldn’t bring himself to listen to, and he knew he could rush to her side, be strength and comfort in her time of need, and sleep in the quiet little guest room she kept upstairs. But he didn’t do that.

Eventually, the aimless drive began to take shape, and by the time the sun was rising he found himself in New York City, driving first towards Gibson’s and then, really thinking about it, veering sharply off course and into the Bronx where, with a little trouble, he found his nephew’s crumbling little building.

Luke seemed happy enough to see him, a bit of acting Jade was infinitely grateful for. “Should I offer you coffee, or a bed?” the young man greeted him with his rouge’s smile, taking in the bags under his eyes appraisingly.

“Neither. Both. I don’t know,” Jade answered, joining in weakly when Luke laughed. It was early, not yet seven in the morning, but his nephew was groomed and clothed and looking ready for the day. Jade wondered what kind of work he was doing that got him out of bed so early. It certainly wasn’t an inclination that ran in the Puget blood—neither Jade nor Smith had ever been much use to anyone before ten a.m., and their father was no exception. But Jade didn’t ask, was horrified to find that he didn’t care, really, so long as he was permitted to lie down and not be questioned for an hour or two. Then, once he’d rested and had a bite to eat, he was sure he’d be fortified for the drive back to his own city, for the gut-wrenching task of looking down into Adam’s clouded eyes and squeezing his feeble hand and saying, _I’ve been unfaithful_.

Twisting and turning on Luke’s couch, feeling like Judas, Jade couldn’t sleep. He passed the day in a haze of exhaustion and delirium, not waking fully till Luke returned at sundown. Luke fed him takeout, still asking no questions, and Jade sat up a few hours writing, scribbling out the faltering, uncertain notes of Adam’s wretched, failing heartbeat, of his confession. At midnight, instead of beginning the drive home, he collapsed onto the couch with sheets of paper scattered atop him and slept fitfully.

The next morning Luke did not leave the house. Jade wondered what day of the week it was, if it was a workday. He pretended to be asleep long after he woke, hoping Luke would leave so he could slip away unquestioned, by his nephew seemed quite comfortable at the kitchen table, poring over thick binders of papers and forms and pounding away diligently at his laptop. At last Jade gave up the charade and made a big show of stretching and yawning and waking. Luke was unmoved. “Towels in the hall closet if you want to shower,” he said, distracted, waving a hand lamely in the general direction.

Jade did want to shower. He felt that there were years of filth and grime to scrub away, and he turned the water so hot as to scald him, as to scour and burn away his skin, because he wanted to be pure and new and clean, even though he knew the years would not wash off, that it was a waste of soap and water for him to try.

After the shower, he put on his filthy suit, rumpled and slept in and cried on, feeling like an idiot. He took leftover takeout from the fridge and sat across from Luke, feeling strange and sick and transient, poking at the slimy vegetables and greyish meat, the bites he put in his mouth turning to glue.

At long last, Luke looked up at him, and there seemed to be a question there between them. “What is it that you do, exactly?” Jade asked, trying to fill up the space with his own questions.

“I’m a paralegal,” Luke said, not unkindly, and didn’t seem offended by Jade’s exaggerated surprise. It was only that he didn’t know where a son of Smith’s, a nephew of his, would find the ambition for something like that. He wondered how long Luke had been pursuing this alarmingly respectable career—Adam would know. Adam wouldn’t have had to ask at all. Adam would have walked in the door with a smile, and a bottle of wine, and an appropriate, insightful question about Luke’s work, revealing the depth of his attention and care that came so naturally to him.

“And, um, what is today?” Jade asked next. Yes, he was embarrassed. He was shame-faced. He was in hiding. Adam was in a hospital bed dying, and he was here, at Luke’s house, in a days-old suit, inquiring as to the day of the week.

“Saturday the 23rd,” Luke answered as crisply, cocking a brow at Jade now, no doubt wondering if his uncle was in the midst of some kind of psychotic breakdown, wondering who he should call—Gibson because he was closest? Alicia because she’s know what to do? Smith because the other two, the half-siblings, never quite understood? But what could any of them do? Adam was the one to call. Adam was the one who would rescue him, who would know what to do if he was in trouble.

Oh, god. He hoped Luke hadn’t called Adam.

There was a look of real concern on his nephew’s face now, and Jade knew that he had overstayed his welcome, knew that he couldn’t go on sleeping on this couch and feeling timeless, because Adam was in a hospital bed somewhere dying and tomorrow was Christmas eve and he had fucked things up so badly this time, he had no idea what to do.

“The 23rd,” Jade said softly, studying intently the surface of the kitchen table, the ink-purpled edge of his right hand. “I suppose I should be getting home, then.”

“I thought maybe you’d come down for Christmas,” Luke said, volunteering an excuse just a moment too late to be helpful. “That you were coming to Gibson and Lena’s this year? Because you usually go to Adam’s, but…” Luke trailed off there, unable to fill in the blank, unable to answer the question _where’s Adam?_ because Adam had always been right there—for the whole of Luke’s life, Adam had always been there.

“Adam had a heart attack,” Jade said, not daring to look up at Luke’s face, fearful of seeing pity there, fearful of liking it. He did not deserve anyone’s sympathy. “Um. On Wednesday night. I—I haven’t been to see him. I just… I drove to the hospital and I stood outside his room and I looked at him, and he was pale and old and sick, and I… I don’t know. The next thing I really knew I was driving, wondering if I’d freeze to death if I just slept in the car, wondering what would happen if I never went home, and then I was here.” Now he looked at Luke, a pleading look on his own face, concern and mild revulsion on his nephew’s. Good: let the boy detest him. He was detestable. He was small and petty and wrinkled and foul and, yes, yes, Luke should know, Luke should _know_.

“I’ve been having an affair,” Jade said, somewhat absently, in the interest not of full disclosure but of full, unbiased loathing. “A very remorseless thing, guilt-free, for about a month now. With a student of Adam’s. Your age, younger. I ended it, but. Adam’s lying in a bed with tubes in his body and wires on his chest and I’m a coward, I can’t face him, and the only thing in the world that I want is to tell him the truth, and instead I’m here, telling it to you, because I know you won't forgive me.” Jade stopped talking, the flood of words stemmed and dried as abruptly as it had come. Luke was looking at him with real disgust, now, real loathing, real knowledge of how small and weak and despicable he really was, and Jade was glad—Jade basked in his judgment—Jade was happy to shrivel, deformed and mutated and pale, in his nephew’s esteem, was glad to be seen in full daylight as the monster he really was, because no one else seemed to be believe him—Davey didn’t know how to believe him, and what if Adam didn’t either? What if Adam forgave him? What if Adam blamed himself? What if it was one more stress, one more pain, on Adam’s overtaxed, blame-laden heart, and the thing cracked in half this time instead of just stopping, and no one was able to put it back together? What if Adam didn’t hate him for what he’d done—what if Adam wasn’t angry? What if Adam only said _I’m so sorry, Jade_ , what if Adam said _I drove you to this_ , what if Adam took him into his arms and promised to make it up to him?

What the fuck would he do then?

“You should go now,” Luke said haltingly, the words not natural, not easy. “I think you should… leave.”

“You’re right, of course,” Jade said, voice hardly more than a whisper, and gathered up his crinkling sheets of music and revelation, and thanked his stone-faced nephew for his hospitality, and stumbled numbly out of the apartment and back to the car, knowing he had no choice but to go directly to the hospital room where Adam was laid out like an uninhabited body, no choice but to go and tell the truth.

And if Adam forgave him—

What the fuck would he do then?

 

 

Melanie fussed, naturally, throwing open curtains to let in the weak, watery daylight, fluffing pillows and shaking out comforters and getting Adam situated on the couch, ticking off on her fingers the groceries she’d need to buy to keep him fed, pot roasts and lasagnas, chickens and hams she had designs to fill his freezer with, so that all he had to do was put a pan into the oven and turn it on and he’d be fed. She bustled around, writing out emergency phone numbers in clear, precise lettering, penning his complicated regimen of medications, one copy for the refrigerator door and another for his bedside, and she was the size of a globe these days, ripe and ready to burst, and just watching her buzz around made Adam exhausted. She asked who she could call to take care of him, carefully not mentioning Jade or his absence from the house—the house Adam was determined to sell the moment he was able to stay awake for longer than a few hours—pressuring him for the numbers of his mother or his sister, one hen securing another to take over his nest, but Adam insisted he’d be fine. It was the holidays, anyhow—neither of them would possibly be able to fly out now. He’d only worry them, make them feel guilty. He’d call in a few days, he promised her, as soon as the holidays were over. When he couldn’t stand to see her run around or wring her hands or threaten to strip the sheets off his bed and do his laundry any longer, Adam thanked her sincerely for all she’d done, promised to call if he needed absolutely any old thing at all, promised he’d be over Christmas day to eat a mountain of food at her strangely empty table, a twin of his own. And when she hesitated in the doorway, looking like she might cry, he said, “He’ll come home, Melanie. You know he will”, and she bit her lip and nodded, and he knew that that was what she was afraid of, as much as she wanted it—knew and understood the feeling instinctually, because of course he felt it too, because of course she might have said the very same to him and he would have recoiled the same as she did, nodding uncertainly, not knowing what he wanted, not knowing, really, what to do.

As soon as she was gone, he stood and stretched and stopped playing the invalid, because without Melanie there he didn’t have to. Hungry, he ventured to the refrigerator and was hit with the stench of food rotting before the thing was even open all the way. He started by throwing away the things that had gone bad and found he liked it, the purging, the cleaning, the starting fresh, and before long the fridge was empty, almost, a few cans of tonic water that neither he nor Jade would drink and a jar of pickles skulking in the back remaining, and then he started on the freezer.

Adam wrestled the garbage to the curb, enjoying the feel of even mechanical heartbeats, and wondered what he could throw away next. He stalked past Jade’s sealed study as if the room didn’t exist, though if he was searching for catharsis that would have been the thing to purge, and was rifling through his own desk in the library when the wooziness hit him, and he was dizzy and lightheaded as he tottered over to the couch and sat down, burst of energy spent, strength exhausted. He settled into the cocoon of pillows and quilts Melanie had made him, dialed the number of a takeout place by memory—they really didn’t cook, he and Jade—and ordered the thing with the least salt and grease on the menu, a salad with sliced chicken in it. When asked if he wanted the chicken grilled or fried, breaded or plain, he grudgingly took it plain and grilled, healthy, eerily reminiscent of the alfalfa sprout-lined sandwiches they served for lunch on the cardiac ward.

He leaned back on the couch, resting, and his eyes fell on it all at once, the tidy stack of mail Melanie had brought within arm’s reach, laid neatly beside the gift shop thriller she had bought for him, which he had read twice already, just for something to fill the long, white hours between naps and blood tests in the ward.

What was interesting about the mail was the piece on top, stamped URGENT and addressed from the advisory board, his own name and address lettered with great distaste by what was likely the same secretary he’d yelled at. The snide red URGENT was what gave it away: it was the original letter, the one about Davey Marchand’s probation. It had to be.

Adam hesitated before opening it, but only for a moment. Of course, Jade hadn’t come; Jade hadn’t shown up, had never returned Melanie’s calls, could be anywhere, could be dead. And that was proof enough, wasn’t it, of what he’d barred himself of suspecting, of what Burgan claimed to have seen; he didn’t need to see the letter, really, to have it all confirmed. Jade had fled as only the guilty do, and despite everything, Adam found himself taking Burgan’s cruelties as the truth; so surely he could simply throw the letter out, spare himself the pain of reading it, of knowing for sure.

Adam opened it. He shredded the envelope, barely skimmed the brief, stinging missive from the secretary, and held in his hands for a long, quivering moment the letter Jade had written, the letter Jade had signed Adam’s name on almost perfectly, the letter Jade had sent. He read it once, twice, a thousand times, words seeming to come unstuck from the page and drifting, crawling across the white expanse and refusing to stay pinned down; he studied the careful imitation of his signature, so good that at a glance even he might not see it for a fraud. He wondered if Jade had practiced it, when over the years he had become so skilled at forgery, or if it had laid latent in him all along, ignored by Adam’s besotted eyes. The wording was so deliberate, so pragmatic, so _practiced_ : it read like such a letter would read, bore all the pomp of a professor and there, the little aside, the jibe about Adam’s rubrics—he remembered that particular argument with Jade and felt the ghost of a smile about his face, his tired eyes, his weary lips.

Well. He had seen the letter. He held the proof. But he found that upon having it he didn’t want it, really; it didn’t seem so urgent as he’d once believed it was. For all intents and purposes, it seemed that Jade was gone, now. This letter, this forgery, might well be the last Adam had of him, and he didn’t want that, didn’t want that memory. He wanted kissing Jade goodbye on Wednesday morning, wanted bursting into the house calling _honey, I’m home_ , wanted stumbling into the house to find Jade with a kettle on the stove, a soft smile on his face; he wanted Jade’s face pressed to his breast, Jade’s soft, sleepy sigh meandering over his skin, Jade’s murmur in his ear and a thousand years of lies, if that’s what they were, over this.

And yes: all that time, all those memories, they were suspect, now; they were tarnished by the presence of Davey, of how many other, phantoms crowding and clouding the rooms of Adam’s recollection, dirty little inkblots smearing the photographs in Adam’s mind, gnawing away at everything sacred, everything precious.

But that didn’t make it meaningless, Jade at his side. That didn’t turn thirty years to dust, all at once. The letter was a poison, disintegrating and dissolving those things that Adam had held dear, whether those things were real or whimsy beside the point. He folded the letter back into its torn envelope, put it carefully on the edge of the table with the junk mail, a pile of things he could purge, things he didn’t need, things he could throw out.

End Notes:

Your kind words and support mean have meant the world to me and sustained me for the duration of this project. I thank you sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, for every review. You guys are the best kind of readers I could hope for.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



	17. The Spaces in Between

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing the end of this story is the most difficult situation I have ever been in as a writer. Before I let you get on to the exciting conclusion—which, as of writing this note, I still have not chosen—there are a few things I’d like to highlight in my struggle, here. One is the interesting note that throughout this story, Jade has been the agent and Adam has been the experiencer. Jade has actively sought out events in his life, while Adam has let things happen to him. These roles have been definitive; Adam is passive, Jade is active. But here at the end of all things, we aren’t biting our fingernails to see who Jade will choose. In the end, Jade didn’t really get to choose at all; the choice happened to him. The choice had been there all along. The choice was not romantic or grand: it was small and grubby and realistic, it is the sad habitual leaning that is intrinsic to human nature, it is the failing of courage and heart and, yes, it’s deep and enduring love, but it’s also deep and enduring sadness. At the end of this, we are not waiting to see who Jade will pick. We are waiting to see if Adam, passive, martyred Adam, will forgive Jade or not.
> 
> A note, then, on Adam: in the course of all this, in all the wonderful comments I have received, I have heard from all of you how despicable Jade is. And yes—Jade is selfish and horrible, I’m not denying that. But only one of you (to my memory—correct me if I’ve slighted anyone) has ever voiced complaint with Adam. At the very start of this story, Jade pointed out to us what ridiculous archetypes, what caricatures, the characters are—Jade is so pure and perfect in his detestability, Adam so pure and perfect in his infallibility, his martyrdom. It is easy to say that Jade is a toxic person, corrupting, that he is entirely responsible for the state of their relationship—but what real-life scenario is that way? Most of what we hear about Adam is from Adam’s own perspective, his inner voice; and it’s not immediately available, it’s not on the surface, but Adam makes quite a martyr of himself, and Jade more often than not waxes poetic about how wonderful he is, because that is what we tend to do when we are betraying someone—we put them on a pedestal. But, guys, Adam cannot possibly be as perfect as I have portrayed him to be. There has got to be more to his character than that. No one is that perfect. No matter how sorry for himself and his sacrifices he is inclined to feel, no matter how wicked and toxic Jade has been, no one can be in a relationship for 30 years and be completely devoid of responsibility when we consider the state of it. For things to have gotten so bad, Adam has to have been doing something wrong too, even if it’s the smallest evil of letting himself be treated so badly. There is a lot of unwritten history present here; there are innumerable Sins of Adam that are never discussed but surely exist, surely cannot help but exist in 30 years of shared history, 30 years of a shared life.
> 
> And finally, the idea of forgiveness itself. Our Jade is paralyzed by fear—fear that he will be forgiven, fear that he won’t. Adam hasn’t yet addressed the idea directly; that’s coming. But I honestly am sitting here trying to decided what kind of ending I want to give you all, and I can’t think of a single happy one. There’s the obvious ending that seems like it would be happy—Adam forgives, Adam and Jade end up together, happily ever after. But in what way is that happy? That shows us that Adam hasn’t learned or grown or changed, and we’ve seen them together; we know what it’s like. Even if Jade has turned over a new leaf, whatever problems existed on the Adam end of things are still there. The fact of the matter is that they were not especially happy together, even if they weren’t especially unhappy. So Adam forgives him and everything goes back to normal and they just continue to slump on towards the grave—this is not a Disney ending, guys. This is possibly even sadder than the wretched heartbreak of unforgiveness, just a different kind of sadness.
> 
> Okay. I think I have said everything I wanted to say. This is not a true story; none of these events ever happened; I do not own the members of AFI, merely borrow their names. You all have been beyond wonderful and I honestly could not have done this without you. With no further ado, then, let's take the plunge.

Jade, looking homeless, arrived at the hospital just as Mellie was leaving. He was running in the clear glass doors in his rumpled suit and disheveled everything as she was loading Hunter, dead-eyed and ever-so-slightly drooling, into the car. Jade skidded to a halt and she searched his face blankly for a moment before recognizing him—he wasn’t sure whose state the delay reflected most negatively on—and even when her eyes registered his presence, she did not smile. Her face was tight, her brow line, her lips grey. Her hair was lank and the glow of happy Southern pregnancy no longer burned beneath her skin. The planetary bulge of her unborn baby looked like so much unsightly girth poorly hidden beneath a housedress and a raincoat. Neither of them, thought Jade, none of them at all, was recognizable these days.

“You should have come,” Mellie said at last, voice strained as the muscles in her jaw. “He didn’t ask for you, but you should have come.”

 _He didn’t ask for you_. That stung more than Jade would have thought. Adam had never been proud in that way; he had never tried to appear stronger than he was, had never been shy about loving others. If Adam hadn’t asked for him—he must have felt it. He must have heard it. He must have known. Somehow, he must have known. Jade briefly entertained the romantic notion that that was the moment Adam’s heart had failed him; but he didn’t care for romance these days. Every romantic notion he’d ever tried had failed him, or maybe it was the other way around; but he preferred, he found, the cold and clinical. Adam’s heart had failed because a pervasive arrhythmia had met with unprecedented amounts of stress and the thing had just burst in his chest, pulpy and chewed and defeated. It had nothing to do with Jade, with Jade’s betrayal. No matter how much it might suit him, he could not take responsibility for this. The guilt, the self-deception, the gory glory: it wasn’t his. Not this time.

“I’m here now,” Jade said at last, words small and whipped away by the wind, his chapped lips cracking, unconvinced.

“Well, he isn’t,” Mellie said crisply, lips twisting with scorn, eyes abrasive. She shook her head a little, part disgust, part pity. “Adam went home this morning.” She paused, letting the words sink in, and then scrunched up her face, eyes beady, teeth large and white. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she whispered furiously, and Jade’s heart sank; somehow Mellie knew. Somehow Adam knew and somehow Mellie knew and they hated him, the pair of them, together, and he deserved it, he self-pityingly self-loathingly self-self- _self_ deserved it, and he refused to enjoy it, refused to enjoy the bitter guilt and hurt and hatred, because goddamn, couldn’t he think of a single fucking thing outside of him _self_ , just this once?

“He was in the hospital for three _days_ ,” Mellie went on, hissing. “He was in surgery _twice_. And he was _alone_ the entire goddamned time—no friends, no family, just _me_ when I could spare them time, and I am a mess all my own these days, Jade Puget—”

She was quivering, now, righteous in her indignation, accent thicker than he’d ever heard it, eyes hard and lips trembling and so close to losing it all, and Jade realized by degrees that she did not know the full extent of what he had done; maybe no one did. She was mad, this mad, because he had behaved appallingly: he had run and hid and abandoned Adam at his lowest moment, and that was not what family did, clearly, because here _she_ was, burstingly pregnant and tucking the husband she walked out on into his seatbelt and wiping Thorazine drool off his chin, and she wasn’t doing it to martyr herself or to flagellate herself or to glorify herself, wasn’t doing it because tragedy was glamorous or because she thought suffering suited her complexion, wasn’t doing it because she fancied herself some kind of sensitive fucking genius—she was doing it because Hunter was her husband, her family, and that was what family did. That was what family did whether they wanted to or not, and it was not personal or selfish or greedy, and Mellie was not going to exploit this suffering for her own gain—she was not going to write about it, or use it to garner pity or awe. She would not use her pain to deify herself, wouldn’t splash it gaudy upon a canvas and wait for the multitudes to swoon at all the blood; she was not here so that she might better devour herself before an audience. She was here because this was simply where she needed to be, and _how dare he_ not do the same, for the same reasons.

Jade felt ashamed, felt embarrassed, envied her purity and strength, and at the same time rebelled at these things, these feelings, because they were all wrong, all self-imbued, and had nothing at all to do with Adam. “You’re right,” he said at last, because it was the only thing he could think of to say that didn’t start with the word _I_ , and Mellie blotted at tears on her flushed cheeks and closed the car door, her vegetative husband ensconced inside, and Jade realized belatedly he ought to have asked, to have wondered, to have expressed any kind of concern at all.

“Damn straight I am,” she said more loudly, looking away and batting at tears, pathetic and overtaxed and almost certainly noticing it. “He’s at home, if you’re looking for him, but I got to tell you I wouldn’t want to see your face again if I was him.” Mellie took a breath, piece spoken, and glanced up and down Jade’s form. “Shit,” she said softly, taking him in properly for the first time. “You’re not doing so well yourself, are you?” She looked a little angry, that he’d have the audacity to be pitiful at a time like this, and she broadcasted the feeling so clearly that Jade wanted to laugh. It was ludicrous. Everything was ludicrous. He wished he still had the stuffed alligator, because that was ludicrous too.

A small frown on her face, Mellie marched crossly over to the driver’s side of the car. “Might as well tell you we’re having Christmas dinner. I’ll set out a place for you, but I’m not happy about it.”

That said, Mellie lowered herself into the driver’s seat and slammed her door with a flourish, not looking at Jade again as her jaw trembled and her baby kicked and her tears fell and she drove away.

 

 

It was stupid, but Jade didn’t want to walk in looking pitiful. He didn’t want any kind of—of combat advantage, because even he couldn’t delude himself into believing there wasn’t a fight coming. Adam’s temper was and always had been a terrible thing to behold, and Jade was grateful that he’d be too weak and drugged to scream too terribly much—grateful because he knew the sick, squirming point of him would enjoy it, would eat it up, and grateful because after all these years, he liked to think he had at last learned to comport himself in a dignified manner and that maybe he didn’t require screaming at anymore.

He wanted to rush home and see Adam immediately, apologize for the way he’d behaved at Adam’s sickbed before even beginning to explain Davey, but he couldn’t do it in these clothes, in this filthy tux, looking pathetic and beaten and humiliated, because that wasn’t fair. The least he could do was walk in clean and groomed and hale, because he didn’t want Adam to end up comforting him, forgiving him on grounds of his own cowardice, his own weakness. He didn’t want Adam to do what he always ended up doing. He wanted this fight to be a fair one.

Of course, he didn’t have any friends to borrow clean clothes from, didn’t have anyone’s shower he could use, didn’t know anyone who’d be willing to lend a razor.

That’s how he ended up on the fourth floor of Morrow Hall, pretending to ignore the overt stares of the few remaining students in residence and pounding on Davey’s door.

 

 

“Oh, no. Fuck no,” Davey said under his breath, staring at the cell phone buzzing in his hand. The picture on the screen was Jade’s, smiling out serenely, his eyes lazy, catlike slits, barely open; enough of the man’s neck was visible that it was clear he was shirtless, and the pattern beneath his head was the blue and green plaid most commonly found on Davey’s bedsheets.

Davey had been home for a few days now, slowly shaking off the numb stasis of the semester, the frenzied burn of Jade. He was still nursing his heartbreak, his rejection, rolling the bitter taste around in his mouth until he choked on it, digging his fingernails into his palms with the half-assed idea that otherwise he’d feel nothing at all, taking long showers and trying to cry, moping around the house in a way that seemed utterly unsurprising to everyone, and resenting that fact, their lack of surprise, though he’d have resented them even more if they’d noticed or asked questions.

And this. And now this. After everything Jade had put him through, after all the things they’d said and the way they’d left things, that he thought he could just pick up the phone and—

No. Wait. Save it. Davey answered the call, took a deep breath, and if his voice was a little bit on the shrill side, well, who the fuck was Jade to complain. “After everything you put me through, after all the things we said and the way we left things, if you think you can just pick up the phone and—”

“Whoa, hey, Davey, listen,” Jade cut in just as Davey hit a frequency only dogs can hear. “I’m not calling to apologize or make things right or anything, don’t worry.” Davey took a moment to catch his breath and wonder how, exactly, this was supposed to be comforting.

“Well in _that_ case go right ahead,” Davey said, back at normal pitch but as sarcastically as he was able, and Jade missed it entirely, pressing on, uncaring, and Davey wondered how he’d ever thought that this man had known him.

“Great. Um, I know this is awkward and you’re the last person I should be asking for a favor, but quite frankly, there isn’t anyone else I can ask.”

At once Davey wanted to strangle Jade and go to the ends of the earth to help him; his perfect arrogance, his imposition, his pathetic vulnerability, every cave and valley, every half-imagined implication in his pitted voice, every sparkling suggestion in his crackling amber eyes—heartbroken or not, Davey loved him, loved him so damn much it was ridiculous, it was downright stupid, it was maladaptive and it was wrong and it was completely beyond his control, beyond his power to stop.

“What is it, Jade,” he asked through gritted teeth, because he had a nice depressed funk going, and this wasn’t helping, talking to Jade and remembering why he loved him and why he hated him wasn’t _helping_.

“I need a change of clothes. I haven’t… been home. I’ve been wearing this goddamn tux for four days. And you’re the only person in the world who has any of my stuff, and…” Jade was pathetic, floundering, looking for the words and not quite aware enough of what a tremendous pain in the ass he really was. “And also I’d like to borrow a razor,” he added, one last desperate pitch into the uncertain sea.

“I don’t believe this,” Davey said, only partly to Jade, mostly to himself. “You are—you’re an impossible man, did you know that?” Jade chuckled softly, sounding sad and tired, and Davey tried to picture him like this, old and weak in all the ways that Davey was unspent and strong, still in the tux that had once been so becoming and now must look and smell like the men who slept in subway stations. Davey wondered, too, what Jade looked like with four days of stubble; the Jade he had known had always been so carefully pieced together, so carefully groomed, so picture fucking perfect it hurt to see.

“It’s recently been brought to my attention, yes,” Jade said, and it sounded familiar to Davey, the defeated half-amusement in the voice, the particular phrasing of the words, even the specific cadence of it, the intonation—

Months ago, now. Sitting at Jade’s—no, not then, then it had been Professor Carson’s—kitchen table. When he’d told Prof. Carson that his expectation were not as implicit as he thought they were, and the wry smile the man had cracked, the rumble in his deep, creased voice as he said _That’s recently become apparent to me_.

For the first time, Davey pictured them together, sitting at their kitchen table or on their couch or in their bed, Prof. Carson with those all-seeing glasses balanced on his too-large ears, his too-large nose, refracting the hard, splintery silver in his dark, blue-grey eyes, a pile of ungraded papers and pristine rubrics and his red felt-tipped pen, possibly a slide rule because how else did he get each angle and line of those big, crushing Fs so precise—and Jade at his side, Jade not as a quixotic, exotic, obscene bird, but as a man, in pajamas or holey jeans and a t-shirt, with a lined face and thinning hair, and the wan conversation they’d be having, the memorized smiles they’d share, every moment an echo of the moment before it, every day a transparency of the day before it, the ghosts of all their years before flickering in every glance—and how comfortable that must have been, if not ecstatically happy, if not scintillating, if not passionate, how familiar it must have been, and how comforting, comfortable, familiarity was.

And maybe he couldn’t blame Jade—or, you know, at least not hold him personally responsible—for that.

“All right, fine,” Davey said, sighing, not really believing this was happening to him. “There’s a key on the top ledge of the doorframe. To the left. You’re tall,” he added, thinking to himself that it wouldn’t be nearly as much a problem for Jade to get to that key as it was for him.

“You shouldn’t keep a spare key here,” Jade said admonishingly, sounding like his goddamn father, and Davey couldn’t take anymore, couldn’t physically bear another instant of this fresh new kind of torture.

“Listen, just take a razor. I don’t need it back. This is it, Jade, okay? I don’t want to—to do this. If you don’t want me, if you don’t—I mean, if you don’t love me, or can’t, or whatever, then this is it. You are never allowed to ask for another favor. If I see you on the street, I fully expect you to look the other way like I’m not even there. If this is over, it’s got to be over. No takebacks.”

Part of him, maybe, wanted this to scare Jade, to frighten Jade, to send Jade back to him, back into his scrawny arms. And part of him was just tired of it, sick of it all, and meant exactly what he said.

“I’m leaving the key on your dresser,” Jade said.

“What? No, put it back on top of the door.” Davey rolled his eyes to himself—because this, this kind of behavior, as much as all the rest, was typical of Jade, was perfectly fucking typical.

“No, I’m not doing that.”

“That is where my spare key _goes_ , Jade.”

“Someone is going to walk in here and steal all your stuff if you keep your key on top of the door.”

“Jade, just put it back on top of the door.”

“That’s not a good place for it! It’s not safe there. You should leave it with a friend.”

“I am not arguing with you about this!” Davey cried out at last, exasperated and wanting to throttle Jade and at the same time strangely giddy, strangely glad that this was it, this was the end, their last would not be a long, drawn-out plea or befuddling conversation about a moth or a poem or whatever the hell that had been, it would be Jade behaving like a frustrating child or, worse, old person, and Davey at his wit’s end, and it seemed like this was a better ending than anything scripted or imagined or tearful or raw, a silly argument about a stupid thing, and then, at the end, _free_ , like a kite with its string cut, drifting up and onwards into the abyss—and yes, it was impossible to know where the kite was going, if the kite was going anywhere, if it would end up bedraggled, tattered and ruined in a tree, in the power lines, in a sewer the next time it rained, or if it would just keep floating, higher and higher, until it was a speck against the blue, if it would keep on going until the speck was gone, if it would go up and up and just keep on going.

Davey was okay with not knowing.

“Fine, I’m putting it back on top of the door, but just for the record, you should know that this is a horrible place to keep your spare key,” Jade’s voice came, a little huffy, and also with a note in it like Davey was being the annoying one with the stupid, unreasonable favor.

“ _Thank_ you,” Davey said, bluntly exasperated, and then there was a kind of silence.

“So,” Jade said. “Um.”

“Goodbye, Jade,” Davey said, and even as his throat knotted up and his chest filled with sorrow and he hung up the phone for good, forever, and he didn’t know—it was impossible to know what would happen to a kite cut free—he was okay with not knowing.

 

 

One day later, Adam was tackling the hall closet. It was filled with three years of shopping bags, paper and plastic alike, junk mail and newspaper and unread magazines, receipts and user’s manuals and copies of their income taxes, a whole mess of paper, a lifetime of paper, a snarl of the scraps and leavings of two people living out a life. Above the mess, old raincoats hung, coats crumpled and torn and years unworn, coats they’d packed and moved across the country and unpacked again on multiple occasions, coats they hadn’t worn in ten, fifteen years, but still owned, somehow.

What Adam was wondering was why the hell they never threw anything out. Normal people, he felt, threw things out. There was that whole spring cleaning phenomenon, wasn’t there? That wasn’t just something people did on TV. He knew this because Melanie Burgan did it, because his sister did it, because it was something people did—annually relieving themselves of the things they had accumulated, the things they didn’t need, those among their useless things they could bear to part with. It seemed healthy—like shedding skin. It didn’t make sense to him why they would pack into boxes and move from one college town to another issues of Newsweek and the New Yorker from the early 90s that neither of them had ever expressed an interest in reading. Magazines were, of course, highly symbolic of good intentions; but they kept coming, month after month, and had so many _pages_. It was always impossible to stick with it, impossible to keep up.

He and Jade were not—he and Jade had not been—he and—well. Neither of them were magazine people, and leave it at that. They were not capable of honoring their magazine subscriptions, and though they had tried it time and again, it was not something that worked for them and he could not wrap his mind around the fact that they had held on to what seemed to be every damned one of them, as if they still harbored intentions to read the damn things, magazines from the 90s and earlier, magazines that were goddamn collectibles by now, if anyone in the world bothered to collect magazines.

He threw them away now. The bags, the receipts, coupons that had expired decades ago—all of it went into gaping black garbage bags, and all of these went to the curb. He was stronger, already, than he had any right to be; he wrestled the bags to the curb, squatted for a moment to catch his breath, and filled his lungs with crisp December air with relish.

He threw away papers he probably ought to have kept. He chucked the magazines, the phone books, the coats. The decomposing tennis shoes, the scarred galoshes—all of it went into black plastic shrouds, all of it went to the curb. This was his project, his Christmas present to himself, and a practical exercise on top of all that—his brand new housing allowance, his brand new salary, burning a hole in his pocket. He was exorcising the house, not of Jade, not of himself, not of their life together, but of all the crap they had accumulated and kept, everything in the grubby clapboard walls that they didn’t—that he didn’t—that wasn’t needed.

This is what he was doing. He had a bag, a full bag, stuffed with coats and newspapers and receipts and shopping bags, and he dragged it down the hallway, out onto the front stoop, and was making for the lawn when he looked up and saw Jade, Jade standing there—no, worse, Jade _leaning_ there, leaning against the side of _his_ Buick, clean-shaven and wet-haired and handsome in a black sweater and dark jeans, one hand in his pocket and the other at his waist, waving a strange, stiff little finger-lift wave, a look on his face like Adam didn’t know what.

Three—four days gone, and then there, standing there, _leaning_ there, a look on his face like Adam didn’t know what, and Adam struggling with this great bag of trash, _their_ trash, and a plastic box in his chest and a battery for a heart, and Jade with that _look_ on his face, and—

“Can I come inside?”

No. Yes. Do you even have to ask? And, how fucking dare you. And, god I am so empty without you please come home. And, never again. Never ever again. And, this isn’t anyone’s home anymore, mine or yours or ours, so why the hell not? And, this is all your fault.

“Yeah.” Word pronounced, halting, painful, Adam turned his back firmly on Jade, lurching onwards towards the curb with his burden, grimacing in pain and sorrow and loathing and longing, but only after his face was turned away. He wiped the slate carefully clean again, biting his tongue to smooth the creases in his cheeks, to erase the wrenched-up rifts around his eyes, but he needn’t have bothered; the Buick sat in the driveway, salt-crusted and rusted and caked with ugly city snow, looking like a wisp of a thing, a memory, and no one leaned on it now.

The front door hung open, a loose glottis, an unfinished tongue, and the light that came from inside was cold and dull as the knife in Adam’s gut, and it was hard to convince his knees to bend, his feet to shuffle forward.

He paused on the threshold, winter at his back and winter at his front, chill biting. He didn’t want to do this, suddenly—wished he’d never gotten the letter, never listened to Burgan, never known. That was sad, maybe, clinging to his ignorance; but ignorance floated. Ignorance would keep him afloat. Knowledge was heavy; knowledge was dragging him down. He’d been a strong swimmer, once upon a time, but that was a whole heart ago.

Jade’s voice came from down the hall, falsely cheerful. “My god, there’s an entire closet in here? I had no idea.” Adam took strength from how deeply he detested the falseness. He pulled the door shut behind him, winter out, winter in, and strode down the hallway like he owned it, mere presence pushing Jade out of it, sidestepping like a crab.

Adam followed him into the kitchen, taking a moment to fill up the doorway imposingly, dominating the space, before forcing his way into the suddenly claustrophobic place. It was difficult to speak around all the anger. “You walk in here after all this,” he said quietly, voice still and reserved and dangerous, “and _that_ is what you have to say to me?”

Jade winced, squirmy about the eyes, and Adam was glad to see it, vindictively glad, reacquainted all at once with schadenfreude. It had been a long time since he’d been properly angry; it felt strangely good to be back. To be right for once. To be in control. To own the high ground.

“How are you?” Jade ventured, hand hovering over his own heart before falling limp to his side.

To be honest, to be cruel, Adam pulled aside the neck of his pullover, stretching the ancient t-shirt beneath, to bare his breast, the top corner of the box, the ragged purple line of stitches. Jade looked wide-eyed and woozy and Adam felt a little bad, like he shouldn’t have shown it, and didn’t like feeling bad. He settled the pullover back into place. “I received the most interesting letter,” Adam said, for though he’d thrown out the letter, though he’d thought it hadn’t mattered, it mattered after all; it was a piece of land to stand on, a piece of land that belonged to him, one he had won—it was a failure, a betrayal, a whatever-the-fuck that Jade had to hold up, not him.

Jade’s face was a mask of hesitancy, uncertainty. A guilty man, not knowing which of his crimes he was to hang for, not wanting to give anything away. “It was an expression of gratitude,” Adam went on, voice swelling with each word. “Thanks to my thoughtful intervention, it seems one of my students—”

For his part, Jade knew all at once where this was going. His face didn’t fall so much as the mask crumbled away; without really appearing to change, his eyes and lips and lines were made over into a plea, a desperation, an apology. “Adam, stop, please,” Jade said, everything about his voice admitting he had no right to ask it. “Please listen to me. I want to tell you. What I did.”

Adam laughed, then, not meaning to, something hard and cold and cruel rising in his neatly stitched electric chest and parting his lips like ice. But the laugh was the only cold thing in him, because when Jade stepped near him, arm faltering, arm extended, Adam was fire and heat and violence; Adam caught Jade’s outstretched arm and twisted it roughly, using it to pull Jade into him, close enough to dream sensation, using it to hold Jade in place, in pain, gratified to hear a frightened whimper—justified. Unpredictable. And the anger was big now, huge, so that he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t stop; and a voice to match, a brute, a beast, a roar. “I know what you fucking did!” A voice bigger than the both of them, a yell to rattle windows in their panes, to shatter glass. “I know _who_ you fucking did! What I don’t know, Jade, is _why_ —so why don’t you fucking tell me _that_.”

Jade’s face was white, white and wrinkled and pathetic in its age, in its weakness, in its fear, and Adam wondered how long they had been pathetic, how long it had all been a joke, and why it had taken him all this time to notice it, to wake up and realize how _fucking pathetic_ all this was.

“I’m so sorry,” Jade squeaked out, face so near Adam’s, so like a stranger’s, and Adam wondered if this wasn’t pathetic too, the violence and the anger, if after all this time he shouldn’t just diminish and fade away, knowing better. “I—I thought I had to. I didn’t, I don’t know what to do. I came here to tell you that I’m sorry, and I understand if—”

Adam knew what was coming next and didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to hear Jade giving up yet again, didn’t want to see the steel and bitterness that had always made him so unyielding, so tenacious, fold and decay, so he roared again, roaring over Jade’s words, blotting them out, but this time the words weren’t what he’d thought they’d be. “I don’t know who I am if I don’t love you!”

Hearing his words still the air, feeling the truth of them, Adam relented. He unclenched his fingers from Jade’s arm, stepped back, dropped his voice to repeat it, the awful crux of it all. “I don’t know who I am if I don’t love you.”

And Jade, sad sweet Jade stared plaintively back at Adam, and he said in a whisper, in a memory, in a dream, “Me neither.”

And after thirty years, how could he forgive Jade? After thirty years, how could he not? “Where do we go from here?” he asked, head swirling, heart thumping a high, tinny whine, trying to shudder and throb but stopped by an invisible hand, cool and metallic.

Jade shook his head helplessly. “I have spent a lifetime treating you badly, and I’d spend another making amends, if you’ll let me.” He hesitated and then leaned forward, crashing his cold lips into Adam’s own, and it was a fleeting, desperate thing, a last kiss, Adam tasting of fire and salt; and Adam kissed him back roughly and broke away, eyes open, eyes boring.

“Do you have somewhere to stay?” Adam asked, voice husky.

Jade nodded, looking down. “Back to the Super 8 tonight. Tomorrow I’m going down to Gibson and Lena’s—the holiday, you know. I can stay there as long as. Or, um, until. I work things out.” His voice and words got smaller and smaller, faltering into uncertainty, as he spoke, trying to patch the rift between them with useless words. Adam worked his head on his hinged neck stiffly. He should offer Jade the couch, or a spot in his own bed, or a ride to his brother’s, but—

But. But he couldn’t, somehow, take that step. “After all these years,” he heard himself say instead, voice dead and pale and blank of accusation, “how could you do this?”

Jade opened his mouth, closed it again, and Adam knew the answer. After all these years, how couldn’t he?

Adam knew his forgiveness, if he possessed such a thing, would be a process, slow and aching, one perhaps neither of them could bear. He needed Jade, he hated Jade, he couldn’t stand being near Jade, he couldn’t stand to be away: it would take time, too much time, to reconcile all these things. Pardoning one indiscretion in a lifetime ought to be a simple thing. He was old enough, _wise_ enough, to know it. But he looked into himself, hoping to find a strength that yielded, an eye that turned itself blind, and came up empty. If he could forgive Jade—and how could he, how could he not—he couldn’t do it today, that much he knew for a fact.

“Can I come back tomorrow?” Jade asked softly. “To talk, or for my things, or—”

And Adam couldn’t bear his flinching uncertainty, a dog well expecting to be kicked, so he said, “Yes. Of course. I’m going over to the Burgans’ at one, but after that—”

Jade nodded quickly, gratefully, and left a fleeting touch on Adam’s forearm, so brief that it was ended by the time Adam registered the brush of fingertips, the faint squeeze. And then he was gone, presence streaming from the room in hazy rivulets, his head bent and shoulders low, his body small and unpossessed and edging out the door.

Adam wanted to grab handfuls of it, the Jade-ness, as it slipped away all around him, wanted to yank Jade back and never let him go, but didn’t. He kept his hands at his sides, fingers spread, palms open, holding his breath to prevent the accidental taking of Jade into his lungs.

 

 

Jade woke the next morning with a weight of dread upon his chest. The air was choking him and he was still, unstirred; he shivered and knew already how the day would go, once he got out of bed. He would snap at Adam over breakfast; wounded and hungover, Adam would make no effort to be kind or mask his feelings; the door would slam and Jade would swear. He would pick up and put down breakfast dishes and stacks of paper in his office; he’d take a shower hot enough to scald him and cry. Then he’d get angry with himself but feel too heavy and sad to do anything about it. The main thing was, he wouldn’t write a note all day, and by the time Adam got home he’d just be exhausted. Adam would smile, remorseful for slamming the door in the morning, and ask him how his day was, what he’d written; Jade would lie and say the symphony was going well, that it was almost finished. And he would not flinch when Adam kissed him, and he would not speak during dinner, and he would collapse into his bed at the end of the day, too drained to ever move again.

Jade rolled over and pressed himself into the warm expanse of Adam, burying his head against his partner’s chest, listening to the steady heart beat. He was still safe, here; safe from the day that was coming, the days that would follow. He wanted to stay that way eternally, listening to Adam’s heart, never moving again, refusing to rise and meet the demons that awaited him.

Jade started awake, face smothering-deep in a lumpy motel pillow, all-at-once torn painfully from dreamspace, from a memory or a fabrication of his old life, of yet another old Jade, one who carped and cursed and cried and spent mornings in a rigid, ragged unwilling panic, already spiraling away into the wasteland spread before him, crippled with dread, but for all that one who woke near Adam. The dream at once stark and indistinct, for it could have been any day, any one of a hundred different days, days when he had never heard the name Davey Marchand and woke and slept in perfect, unfailing misery. That could have been this morning, maybe, if he hadn’t—if he’d never. At once wistful, wracked by longing, and held horrified by despair. Did he really dream of this, the way things were, and want it? Was that grim old reality better, really, than where he was now?

He had been selfish, yes. He had been malicious and deceitful and foul. He had broken every promise, waste every creed, defiled every law that might hold him accountable for it. he had lost everything, or nothing—it was only a matter of perspective.

What he asked himself was, would that be better? Waking beside Adam in a bed of bitterness, of anger, maybe spending the whole day there, paralyzed by what awaited him, not knowing what it was he had, not seeing what he stood to lose?

For the first time Jade asked himself if he had done a good thing. A bad thing, to be sure; the wrong thing. But maybe somehow the right thing as well. He had shattered the stasis, the hateful madness of their days; and if Adam could be persuaded to gather up the pieces, was it insanity to think they might fit them together in a better way?

Or maybe he’d be better to leave the pieces where they lay, splinters and slivers and shards to tread upon and be cut open, a different world of awfulness, of shame and guilt and pain.

Jade threw back the sweat-soaked sheet and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, fitting his feet to the floor, to what was real. Their old way—he didn’t want to go back to it, maybe. Maybe waking up next to Adam wasn’t worth all the rest. Maybe it was necessary that they rebuild; maybe it hadn’t been such folly to throw their all into the flames.

He wanted to call Adam, to tell Adam this, but the clock glared a red obscenity, an hour he was loath to consider morning, and anyway he didn’t have the words.

Super 8 did not have hotel stationery, so he tore out the blank pages from the back of the Bible, the phonebook, the TV guide, gather the paper around himself, disheveled and beautiful and blank, and he started his fourth and final movement not with certainty but hindsight, a hard-won knowledge that precluded him from scratching out a single note, because the things that matter in a man’s life, the things that count, are set in stone.

He wrote of Adam. He composed the notes of Adam’s breathing, the steadfast qualities, the bassline of an unflinching heart. He wrote deliberately, carefully, all the bits he had left out in the other movements—all the silences, all the spaces in between, that gave shape and form and meaning to any whole. For every time he had written only of his own hollow self, he now wrote Adam in, because this was the thread of his life that he’d been missing; the Thousand Year Score was a journey, yes, but not _his_ journey, because no man travelled so far alone.

He sat in a motel while the weak winter sun struggled rise on the horizon, self-evident in the language, in the phrase, and he blackened his scavenged pages, bloodied them with ink, pouring years and multitudes into the music, infusing it with Adam and the spaces in between, the notes he should have been writing all along. He didn’t know if it was good, this music, couldn’t hear how it sounded outside itself, didn’t know how it would fit with all the complicated rest, it being of a different quality, a different breed, but it was strong and true and beautiful to him, so far inside it all, because what else could it be? It was his life, his death, his everything. It was Adam.

 

 

Christmas day, a grey bleak morning. Adam rose early and scrubbed a lifetime of salt from his skin. He swallowed a solar system of pills, to stave off infection, to purify his blood, to keep it anemic and clean and running thin. He shaved carefully, because a single nick could end his life and he knew this, and dressed slowly, pressing each article of clothing to his skin with great care, taking the time to feel it, covering blood blisters and bruises and a thousand puncture marks, the worst of them the memories of shots into his stomach, spreading black and brackish and strange across the speckled spread of gut. He clipped his fingernails, overgrown and ridged with yellow, performing all the tiniest of sacraments, the rituals of cleansing and self-care he expected himself to adhere to. He brushed his teeth for three full minutes and carefully flossed the tender gums; he gargled with Listerine until his eyes watered and spit it gasping, feeling clean and orderly, tingling and alive.

It was important to observe these tiny rituals. It was sacred and it was holy and he didn’t know how else to fill the day.

He made decaf coffee, brewing just one cup, fluffing the filter and measuring out guilty grounds with precision and care. He prepared and ate one egg, white only, fried without butter and eaten without salt. He drank one glass of orange juice, short, and a taller glass of water. He did all these things exactly; he did everything right. He washed his glasses and his dish, each glittering deadly tine of his fork and dried them, laying them back into drawers and cupboards with the barest of clinks, and checked the time.

Hours yet ‘til he would be expected at Melanie’s. Hours yet, and not a single newspaper to browse, not a single magazine to flip through and idly read.

That was, he realized at last, why they’d been keeping them. They were sandbags; they were ballast. They were rags stuffed into the cracks. They existed to fill the spaces, the spaces in between.

 

 

The honest truth was, she had gone to the trouble of baking a peach pie and was a little bit miffed there was no one there to eat it. She, with a drooling drug-infused shell of a husband and a son eight months made thrashing in her belly and bloodstains on her grandmother’s Persian rug being steamed out by a judgmental Chinese man and an invalid neighbor with a clockwork heart and a bachelor’s sensibilities and a roast in the oven and two homemade pies, had gone to the trouble for a man she considered a personal friend, and he hadn’t even had the decency to show up.

Melanie brought out the roasted red potatoes with a crushed pecan and rosemary crust, taking care not to slam the dish onto the table—her mother’s china—and then the asparagus spears in heavy cream and white wine, and not once did either of her invalids so much as offer to lift a finger, and by the time she staggered out with the red roast beef she didn’t care so much about the slamming. Her husband jumped, playing at being a real man, and she threw a cloth napkin in his direction because he was perfectly capable of wiping away his own damn spittle, and so did her neighbor, and him she shot an apologetic glance because with a heart like that he wasn’t meant to be startled and she didn’t like to take chances.

They ate in silence, her eyes burning holes in the empty place setting, dishes clinking politely and Adam trying not to notice when she cut her husband’s meat and then took his knife away, but it was something she had to do, something in the pamphlet about home care from the doctor, the one who took in her engorged belly and said kindly, “You know, there are other options”, as if she couldn’t take care of her own damn family.

Adam kept glancing at the slime trail on Hunter’s chin, the bits of chewed potato sliding down it, the cream sauce in the corner of his mouth, but she wasn’t going to wipe his face or his ass for him, those were the ground rules, not when had limps and volition and a mind of his own. If he thought he’d get away with it, if he thought she didn’t see the glimmer of himself in his dull eyes, well, he had another think coming because her husband was in that overgrown shell of a man and she’d be damned if she tolerated his asinine little plot to hide it.

And Adam, bless him, he praised her cooking and refilled all their glasses, thinking she needed his help, which she didn’t, and he ought to consider caring for his own family before he got involved in hers but she was grateful, too, because how the hell was she supposed to do this on her own?

“If you want to hide in here,” she’d said to her husband while she checked him out of the ward, “if you want to take all that medication and pretend that you’re not in here, that’s just fine with me. If you want your child to grow up in this world,” she had said, mouth right up in his ear so he’d have to hear her, “without any father to speak of just because you’re afraid of whatever it is that’s inside you, you go right ahead and I won’t stop you. If you want to spend your life in this place filling up diapers and eating all your meals with a plastic spoon because you’re not enough of a man to live with what you’ve done,” she’d said, helping him into the wheelchair he didn’t need, “you feel absolutely free to do that exactly. I will bring you straight back here if that is what you want, but I am your wife and it is Christmas and you are spending it at home, so don’t you dare fight me.”

And he hadn’t. He had been still as a lamb, serene as a mollusk, as she wheeled him out the doors and helped him into the car, and he had not made a wayward peep ever since.

“I’m taking over your Eastern Diaspora section while you’re on leave,” Adam said to her vegetable husband while she brought out the coffee tray, decaf all around of course, and she thought that was kind of him, the way he kept trying, even with the drool at Hunter’s collar, now, soaking in, its torturous passage yet molested. “I’ve been looking over your syllabus and I have a few questions. Do you have any notes I can borrow, any pointers?”

And the drool crawled on and her husband said nothing, and if he could feed himself he could certainly wipe his own damn chin, and he gave no outward expression but she saw his shoulders tighten because Eastern Diaspora was his keynote class, he’d written books about it, and she knew he’d thought they’d cancel it without him, and half of her thought _well, well, well, looks like we’ve all created monsters_ and the other half was still just so, so angry.

And he was in there, damn it, she knew he was, if his shoulders could go tense with displeasure and he could, however mechanically, eat more potatoes than anything else like he was being sneaky, like she didn’t damn well know rosemary crusted potatoes were his favorite, then he could wipe his mouth and he could say _when_ when she poured his coffee, could stop her with just one word before scalding liquid slopped over the rim and onto her great-aunt’s white table linens and then, yes, cascading over the edge of the table and burning, boiling hot, into his lap, across his legs, and he could say _stop_ or recoil at any moment and they both knew it because he was _in there_ , and she kept pouring, would pour until he made her stop or the carafe was empty, and by degrees her own words broke in on her, a hysterical woman shouting _I know you’re in there, I know you are_ , and the tears on her face and Adam’s hand on her arms and taking the carafe away and helping her sink heavy into an empty chair.

This wasn’t her fault, what was wrong with him, and she couldn’t have stopped him or seen it or saved him, she couldn’t have possible, so this was _not her fault_ and what kind of woman, really, would want to put her husband in a home—what kind of woman would think that like this she’d be better off without him, that Alexander changed everything, that she couldn’t possibly care for them both herself—what kind of woman would think that about her _family_?

And Adam using her good cloth napkins to soak scalding coffee up from her husband’s lap, and him darting up to wipe the chin with a glance back at her before she can stop him, and the baby kicking and rolling inside her, and this his first Christmas, and Adam leading her husband upstairs to change his clothes, and her thinking, her instead of being grateful thinking, if only I’d kept pouring, he would have made me stop—look at Adam playing along with this horrible game when I know, when I _know_ , he’s in there.

 

 

He rang the doorbell, nervous and absurd, because he’d never rung his own doorbell before, and perhaps that still held true. At the last minute he’d remembered his sideboard idea, the beautiful, enduring piece of furniture and symbolism he’d wanted to give Adam, but he didn’t have any way to transport one even if he could find a furniture store open on Christmas, because of course the car was Adam’s, of course he’d forfeited the keys. The sonata, first and only draft, inky and unpolished, would have to do. His hands were bruise-dark with ballpoint smear and the misfit pages were all different sizes, the wide yellow from the phone book so sheer the notes on the back showed through on the front, but Jade would have to work around that because this was, now and forever, the only copy.

Adam answered the door, looking rattled, looking guarded. Jade had meant to say _hello_ or _Merry Christmas_ , but what came out of his mouth instead was “Are you all right? What happened?”.

Adam shook his head and invited him in, and Jade thought he’d get no answer, but in the kitchen Adam served him tea in his own chipped coffee cup and said lightly, “Melanie was upset that you missed dinner.”

Jade relaxed into the small talk, the comfortable pattern of conversation with Adam. “I thought that, given the circumstances…”

Adam held up a hand. _Say no more_. “She attacked Burgan. Or… I don’t know what. Poured hot coffee all over him, a look on her face like she just couldn’t stop.”

Jade hoped this wasn’t a preamble to anything. The kettle sat steaming unobtrusively on the stove. “She’s frustrated, of course,” Adam went on, looking up from his hands, which were folded around his own mug, to steal a look at Jade. “I can’t imagine what it would be like,” he said quietly, both kind and cruel, “to so completely lose someone I loved.”

He was supposed to say something here, he could tell, but he didn’t know what. Instead he presented his grubby sheaf of papers, sliding it awkwardly across the table. “Uh, merry Christmas,” Jade said. “This is, um, this is for you.”

Adam had a look on his face Jade couldn’t read, neither overtly good nor bad, a quiet look of feeling, whatever the feeling was. He rifled through the pages, studying seriously the notes. “You know I can’t read music,” he said at last, without rebuke.

Jade scooted his chair closer to Adam’s, angling the music towards them both, euphoric when Adam did not move away. “Well,” he said, giving the sheets the same attention Adam did, “this is the melody of you.” He underlined a measure with his finger. “This is what you breathing sounds like. This over here—” Flipping pages, tapping a bar—“this is you in a field somewhere picking poppies for me. Remember? When I had my appendix out? And this and this and this—” Jade’s hands flew over the work, eyes intent on Adam’s profile, scouring for a sign, a change.

“All of this is you, loving me. These are the times I’ve seen you cry. And here—you laughing, and the look on your face the first time you kissed me, and how you take your coffee, what kind of sandwiches you like, and what it felt like when your cardiologist explained what had gone wrong, and—” He stopped, took a breath. He was getting too worked up, speaking too quickly. “My whole symphony, Adam, it’s been self-obsessed. I’ve been writing about me, thinking the key to everything was me, and… it’s you, of course. The symphony, my _life_ , are as much about you, maybe more about you, as they are about me.”  
Adam was looking at him now, not the page. “This is my sonata,” he said. “This is you. I haven’t loved you well enough, I know that, but…”

He trailed off helplessly, knowing how empty it all sounded, how much like something he would say, and didn’t know how to impress upon Adam the reality of this, the conviction. “I’m sorry,” he said instead. “Please know. I am so, so sorry.”

Adam took a deep breath himself, blinking rapidly. “Thank you, Jade,” he said gruffly, a voice that meant he was struggling with something, something big he felt. “This is… a very nice gift.” He took another breath, eyes sparkling, and visibly forced himself to meet Jade’s gaze. “Would you… play it for me sometime?” he asked haltingly.

The words hit Jade like apotheosis. They meant—they meant there was something, still. Some small chance. He wasn’t forgiven. He wasn’t absolved. But there was, maybe, some small chance he’d be allowed to make it right—to fill the gaps—to make amends for all the awful empty spaces in between.

“I would like that,” Jade said, though he barely got the words out. “I would—I would really like that.”

 

 

 

 

 

end  


End Notes:

I started writing this yesterday. I couldn't finish. I was up all night, shredding myself over possibilities, talking it out with anyone who was listening, trying to figure out what to do. I didn't know what Adam should do because I have always been the Jade of this situation. I didn't know what Adam WANTED to do, what Jade wanted him to do, what could possibly happen. I spent every free moment of today, in classes and out, scribbling in a notebook; I spent every free moment this evening transcribing away, probably presenting you with something riddled with errors. (I have two midterms tomorrow. If I fail them, I am blaming Art.) In any event, this is what I've come up with. Thank you for being so amazing throughout this--I would like to thank you all individually, if possible, for supporting me and encouraging me and keeping this story moving. I have surprised myself that I was able to keep up with this piece's fickle demands, and I hope I have done you all justice. Thank you for being with me, and thank you for telling me how I've done. Love it or hate it, I love you a thousand times over simply for being here.

P.S. No one died, no one was punched in the face, and no one was deeply in denial about their sexuality. It's a little hard to believe I really wrote it. (I love you.)

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8346>  



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